This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.
And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it isthe one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 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.”
When I was in my first year of university, I took a class in classical civilisation. In one of my first classes, the professor opened the class this way: “The writer of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 had clearly never met each other, and likely had never read each other’s creation accounts, which were put together by a later editor.” Evidently, my professor thought the later editor who supposedly stitched Genesis 1 and 2 together did not have the basic ability to compare. For if they truly were different accounts, ancient man would have to be near-illiterate to put them side-by-side. So either the editor of Genesis was the most careless editor in history, or many modern critics are misunderstanding how ancient writings work.
Simple charity to our ancestors means we can reject the first option. The second is the correct explanation: modern readers misunderstand ancient writings. Ancient writers had different ways of writing history. One of those was to describe an event from one angle, and then to describe the same event from another angel with a different emphasis. We find this when we compare the books of Kings and Chronicles. Even the Gospel accounts show this kind of overlapping and yet distinct accounts of the same event. This is how we read Genesis 2 next to Genesis 1. We need not claim they were written by different authors. Some do think Genesis 1:1-2:3 was dictated by God to Moses, that 2:4- chapter 5 was written by Adam, chapter 5 through 10 by Noah, and that these were compiled by Moses. But whether or not that is true, Moses is clearly given as the overall compiler, editor and writer of Genesis, and we are sure he saw no contradictions between chapter 1 and chapter 2. Instead, chapter 2 has a particular focus, a zoom-in lens which takes primarily the events of day 6 and shows them to us in slow-mo, and in great detail.
Whereas chapter 1 is the grand explanation of the creation of the whole cosmos, the heavens and the earth, in verse 4, we even see the order reversed: the earth and the heaves. Here the emphasis becomes mankind. Chapter 1:26-28 already gave us much information: man is made in God’s image, made male and female, made to fill the earth, subdue it and take dominion. But chapter 2 is all about man. It is about the home God made especially for him. It is about his unique creation. It is about his unique calling. It is about his unique test/command/probation. It is about his unique companion. This is the passage answers the question, what sort of creature is man? It is about the high calling of humanity.
Probably like never before the doctrine of man is under attack. Activists are attacking sex, gender, and sexual behaviour. Activists are attacking culture and race. Evolutionists are attacking human origins. Psychologists are attacking human nature. Transhumanists and certain AI proponents are attacking human nature and destiny. More than ever, people don’t know the answer to the question, “What is a human?” Genesis 2 has the answer for us. It will answer this question for us in four fundamental ways: man’s unique creation, man’s unique country, man’s unique calling, and his unique command.
I. Man’s Unique Creation
This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
The words “this is the history” is one of the markers in Genesis that we have begun a different section. Verse 5 and 6 describe the world before day 3. Evidently, it was a different hydrological cycle the world had before the Flood. Water did not evaporate from the sea and fall on the land. It seems the water was subterranean and came up, watering the earth through springs and through evaporation and condensation.
Jehovah Elohim – name used throughout.
Verse 7 gives us the close-up view on what God did on day 6 when He created mankind. In chapter 1:28, we read the summary that God made man male and female. But here we have more detail. God made mankind male and female, but He did not make them both at once. Instead, God began by fashioning the first man.
Verse 7 tells us that God did two things to make man, two things that make man a true hybrid. First, He formed man of the dust of the ground. This is the Hebrew word yatsar which is used of a potter moulding his clay. The word for ground is actually adamah, which is where the word adam, or man comes from. Man is actually soil, ground, earth, dust. Man is from the ground, tills the ground, and because of sin, returns to the ground.
Now, you might look at a rock or at soil and conclude that there doesn’t seem to be much similarity between the ground and a human body. But modern chemistry has confirmed that the human body is composed of the elements found in the earth: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, fluorine, zinc, and others.
The second thing God did was to breathe into his nostrils the breath of life. This word for breathed is never used of animals. It’s used in Ezekiel 37:9 in the prophecy to the dry bones: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” ’ ” (Ezekiel 37:9)
The idea is bringing conscious, self-aware, spiritual life. The physical elements of man were now energised into life, but beyond that of animals. Man is granted consciousness: awareness of God, awareness of self, awareness of the world, language with which to think and name and tell. Man is of the ground, a true creature of earth, but ensouled with God’s breath, animated with God’s Words, God’s speech, awakened with God’s life in him. Man is a hybrid creature of heaven and Earth, of physical and spiritual, of animal life and spiritual life. And you will never understand man, his place, his destiny, his abilities, his purpose unless you understand that man is hybrid, like the animals in his body, like the angels in his spirit.
Now this is the moment to answer some of the questions swirling about pre-historic man. What about Australopithecus, homo habilis, homo erectus, Neanderthal man? Was there an historical Adam who really lived, or is this just a myth to help us understand that God took one of the ape species and either providentially or miraculously gave it human consciousness? What should we conclude about the various fossils of supposed ancestors of modern humans?
First, let me show the biblical argument for Adam being historical, and then comment on the fossils.
The Bible has several genealogies that are traced back to Adam. These don’t make sense if Adam wasn’t an actual, historical person. Jesus regarded Adam and Eve as historical, and so did Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul makes several theological arguments based on Adam being a real person. He shows that Adam is the source of the whole race being in sin, and Christ is the source of a new race redeemed and destined for resurrection. Jesus is the Second Adam, Adam is the natural head of the human race and represented us all; so Jesus becomes the Head of the New Creation, and all in Him are saved. We cannot have the gospel without a real Adam, because you cannot have a Second, saving Adam, without a first one.
Second, scientifically, there are indeed plenty of DNA similarities between human beings and apes, be they ape species now extinct or ape species still present. But similarity does not prove identity. Most of the fossils and bones found have turned out to be species of monkey and ape, which only evolutionary assumptions can turn into our ancestors. What DNA can decisively prove is that we come from the same ancestor. But it cannot claim to have proved that apes are our ancestors by virtue of shared DNA. To imagine that there were hundreds of human-like creatures, male and female, living on earth for thousands of years, experiencing death, and then God chose one of them (and apparently created Eve miraculously from that one) simply contradicts far too much Scripture and theology.
Man is a unique creation.
II. Man’s Unique Country
The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.
And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which skirts the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good. Bdellium and the onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it isthe one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hiddekel; it is the one which goes toward the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
One of the surprising things to realise from Genesis 2 is that the whole world was not a paradise. We should have known that, I suppose, from chapter 1, because there man was told to subdue and dominate the world. That shows the world, while uncursed was uncultivated. It was untamed, unshaped, undomesticated.
But what God does is make a garden for mankind. The word Eden means delight. Man was not a bush animal, foraging in the wild thickets of the world, grazing in the grasslands of the world. Man was meant to live in an orderly, tamed, beautiful place, shaped out of the wildness of the world. Just like God spoke order into the chaos on day 1, so God makes a garden out of the wild abundance of the world. The garden had two things which made it a paradise: every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, and a gushing fountain of water that not only irrigated the Garden, but became the source of four rivers, named here Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Now remember that place names are used and re-used, by people who remember the old place. This refers to the land as it was before the Flood of Noah’s Day. Noah and his sons no doubt remembered those place names, and used them to rename rivers and places in their time. But we cannot locate the Garden of Eden using these names, because they must have referred to a completely different location during Adam’s time. The Flood would have certainly destroyed the Garden of Eden, if it still existed during Noah’s day. Without anyone to cultivate it, and with an angel preventing anyone from entering, it had probably become an impenetrable forest by the time of the Flood.
But the point is, man’s country, the home for man, is not the wild. It is a garden constructed out of the wild. Man is meant to live in a place of beauty, order, and abundance. Again, you can see that man is a hybrid. He lives on the Earth, and from the Earth, but he imposes a spiritual order, design and neatness upon the Earth.
It is no wonder that when the Bible closes, God has come to live with man on the New Earth, and the centre of that New Earth is a city. The garden and the city are closely related: orderly, tamed, shaped, designed for habitation.
And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:1–5)
When people speak about living in heaven forever, I add this modification. “Yes, we will, but Heaven will be a place on Earth. We were made for this place. This is our country, and the New Jerusalem will be ultimate taming, shaping, and beautifying of creation.”
III. Man’s Unique Calling
15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.
Back in verse 5, we read “5 before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground;
So here are three words that describe man’s task, man’s commission. In verse 5, man was to till the ground. This is a very broad word which is translated work, serve, worship, till, cultivate. The idea is that man was to be a worker in the Garden. It’s the same word translated tend in verse 15.
In verse 15, the word translated keep means to guard, to protect, to observe and watch over. What did he have to protect the Garden from? Nothing yet, though in chapter 3 we find out Adam did not keep the serpent out of the garden, and he did not protect his wife from his deception.
Putting them together, man was to be an artist, and a soldier, a careful maker and a vigilant protector. Man’s work requires both gentleness and firmness, both care and caution, both subtlety and strength. At this time, work is not cursed with thorns and thistles, so there is no sign that work will be frustrating or fruitless, or even intensely difficult as we know it today. But man was always meant to serve, work, make, create, develop, protect. He was never meant to be an idle layabout on a hammock, having grapes fed into his mouth. Man was always meant to be a worker: shaping creation into God-glorifying shapes.
Here are two applications of this.
First, work is blessed by God and a good thing. Work comes before the Fall. Salvation in Christ does not remove work; it only perfects it. As believers, more than ever, we should use our vocations in life to tend and protect the glory of God in life. We are no longer in the Garden, the ground is cursed, and thorns and thistles abound. But we are still to be using whatever you are called to: plumber, policeman, pilot, politician, parent as a way of cultivating and shaping the world to be more like God’s pattern. More like truth, goodness, and beauty, and less like evil and ugliness. You should be using your strength to protect and guard what is true and good and beautiful from corruption, distortion, decay, and evil.
Second, despite what the Green religion tells us, we are meant to change the world and leave our imprint on it. No, we were not meant to destroy it, ruin it, defile it, poison it. But we are meant to tame it, change it, cultivate it, develop it. Leaving the world “untouched” or “wild” or in their words “unspoilt” is not always a virtue. I am all in favour of game reserves and parks. I love to see animals in the habitats. But it is not an evil thing for man to irrigate, and build dams, and cities, and clear land for farms, and build roads. If done with the glory of God in mind, it is part of our calling.
IV. Man’s Unique Command
9 And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:9)
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 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.” (Genesis 2:16–17)
Since other trees used for food and mentioned in the same breath as the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have no reason for taking these trees to be only figurative and not literal.
It seems the one tree is a tree that by eating sustained and prolonged life. It is not that death was yet a prospect, but apparently their immortality was sustained in a life of dependent trust in God: eating from His provision. Scientists are desperately searching for the chemical compounds that would prevent aging, and completely regenerate the cells of the human body. Apparently, those compounds once existed in this tree’s fruit. And, it seems, the tree will be back in the New Jerusalem, as we just read: “In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
The second tree was the knowledge of good and evil. We don’t think this tree necessarily had something in its compounds that would have a moral effect. Instead, it stood simply as a test.
The test was the knowledge of good and evil. In this time, man knew only the good. He had knowledge of what was good, but he had no knowledge of evil. His knowledge of good was everything his Creator said to him, and everything his Creator did. He knew God had made a good world. He knew God had filled the garden with good fruits. He knew God had given him a good task and commission, fitting for him. He was soon to find out that God would give man a good companion, because God noted that it was not good for man to be alone. The word “good” is all over Genesis 1 and 2. It is what God keeps declaring about His creation. Man Himself is part of the final declaration that all was very good.
So here is really the test: can Adam carry out his task on Earth, trusting in what God’s says is good? Can Adam take God’s word for it that what God says is good is good, and what God says is not good is not good? Put simply, can Adam live by faith? He does not know what evil is. To even know that there is such a thing as evil, he must take God’s Word for it. He must believe by faith.
Man is being called to live by faith: in dependent, submitted trust to God. God simply tells Adam: if you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall surely die. In dying you shall die. You will begin to die, and in your dying state you will finally die physically.
Why? Whys is this test tree even in the Garden? Perhaps because love that has no option to say no is really no love at all. Perhaps because trust must be tested by providing an alternative. If man decides to eat from the tree, what is he saying? He is saying, I want to know good and evil for myself, without God telling me. I want independent knowledge of reality. I don’t want to live under God, letting Him be the judge of what is good for me. I want to decide that for myself. I don’t want to be a child of God. I want to be a god.
Now when you think about it, is not every sin we ever commit a way of saying, “I’ll decide what is good for me, and it is not God’s way!”? Is not every sin really an act of defiant independence, where we refuse to trust in what God says is good, and instead try it for ourselves? Every sin is both an act of unbelief and pride. It is unbelief because God has told us what is good, and we refuse to trust Him. It is pride, because we are saying, we’ll stand on our own, and be the judge of good and evil.
But to break away from the source of life, from the Giver of life, is a flower retreating from the Sun. It is a breathing organism retreating from the air. If we decide that we will seek the good on our own, then the result is a broken link with our source, and so death begins.
Look at our world, and decide for yourself whether we have done a good job in judging what is good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil did not make us more godlike; it made us more devilish. The long story of human suffering testifies to the foolishness of departing from God as the standard of what is good.
In many ways, salvation is like a return. It is as if we come back to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and we put the fruit back. We say, trying to know this brought us nothing but bitter pain. Because of your Son’s death on the cross, we can be forgiven. So now we give back that freedom to take from the tree. We don’t want it. We want You to decide for us what is good, forever. Your Word, Your Law, Your Ways – they are true and just forever. You be our standard. You be our knowledge, You be our conscience. Never again do we want independent knowledge of good and evil. If You say it is good, it is good. If you say it is evil, it is evil. Your Word is truth.
And that is still, in some ways the test, the exam, the probation for man. Man is a unique creation, in a unique country, with a unique calling, but he can only fulfil it if he comes back to this unique command: will you trust your Creator to tell you what is good for you? And what that looks like today is, come back to your Creator through Jesus Christ, receive forgiveness for choosing the evil, and by His Spirit live a life of now choosing the good that God teaches you.
Man is truly the crown of creation. No other creature comes close. In a world of false voices telling you what man is, Genesis 2 says loud and clear: man is a God-breathed creation, placed in this world to make a paradise out of the whole planet, who is only right when he lives by faith in His Creator’s Word. That is what a human is.