Now as we have learned, the peak of creation came on day six. The entire universe as we know it today was created in six 24-hour days, six solar days, with an evening and a morning for each day. There was no evolutionary process whatsoever. There is no evolution from species to species. In fact, God created the universe with all its diversity and variety, as we now know it, in six 24-hour days. But on day six, the final act of His creation was the creation of man and woman in His own image. And, of course, the rest of the created world was merely a stage on which man and woman would play the primary role in history.
God created man, the supreme point of creation, in His own image; which means with self-consciousness, with personality, with rationality, with intelligence, with creativity and the capability for relationship. And then He gave man sovereignty over all the created world, and its vast and rich resources. That was the culmination. With the creation of man, then, the real story begins. Because history is not about matter; it’s not about stars and planets; it’s not about the earth and its topography or geography; it’s not about animals. The real story is the story of man. Everything else was scenery for the story of man and his redemption.
Now the original history of man begins in Chapter 2 Verse 4, and goes on from there to the end of the book of Genesis and, frankly, to the end of time. You could simply say that all of time is divided into two categories: Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3, the creation of the universe; Genesis 2:4 to the rest of history, the story of man. And certainly, that is true to the end of the book of Genesis, Chapter 50 and Verse 26.
So Chapter 2 Verse 4 points forward. The scene has been set. The stage has been made ready. And here is the saga of man. Verse 4 begins, “This is the account,” or this is the “toledoth.” “These are the generations” is what it really says: “The generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.” “These are the generations” of man, when God created the universe. This is the beginning of man’s story.
Now some people have tried to find conflict between the creation account in Genesis 1 and the account in Genesis 2. There is no conflict whatsoever. In Genesis 1, you have the simple fact of man’s creation. In Genesis 2, you have the details of that creation. So in this Chapter starting in Verse 4, man takes the center stage; becomes the subject of all the rest of Genesis and all the rest of human history. Here in Genesis 2 then we’re going to go back to day six because, after all, this is the saga of man. And though man was mentioned in Chapter 1 as one of the details in the creation of the universe, here he takes center stage. So Chapter 2 Verse 4 takes us back to day six, and a more detailed look at the creation of man, which begins his wonderful story.
Now, as we look at the details of day six and the original creation of man, we’re going to note five things; the creation of man, the location of man, the vocation of man, the probation of man, and the relation of man. And I really didn’t have to contrive anything. It just fell out that way, almost as if the Holy Spirit knew that this would come up somewhere down the future to an English-speaking preacher. The creation, the location, the vocation, the probation, the relation.
Now last time we looked at the creation of man in Verses 5 to 7, and I will just briefly remind you of what we learned. Remember now, everything here is on day six. We just look at day six for more detail. And on day six, according to Verse 5: “No shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.” Now that Verse has posed a lot of interesting dilemmas and problems. And in fact, I didn’t really fully understand that Verse up until the last couple of weeks or so, and so I am going to alter the note that I wrote in the MacArthur Study Bible a little bit in the next edition. But this takes us back to day six.
Now, on day six it says: “There was no shrub of the field … and no plant of the field.” Now we know that trees and plants were created on day three. So whatever these are that didn’t exist on day six, they aren’t the same as trees and plants that were created on day three. This is not a reference to the plants and the trees that were created by God on day three. Whatever these are, they are different. And we looked at them last time; fascinating. The “shrub of the field” as it’s translated in the NAS is the “siach” in Hebrew, “siach,” and it refers to thorns and weeds. When man was created, there were no thorns and there were no weeds. Chapter 3 in Verse 18 tells us that part of the curse was thorns and thistles or weeds would grow. There would be, because of the curse, some mutation of the plants into weeds. Such plants did not exist on day six, because there was no sin. There was no curse. Secondly, there was no “plant of the field.” And the word here is “eseb,” and it refers to crops. It refers to the kind of crops that man had to plant by tilling the soil. And that’s why it says at the end of Verse 5 these things didn’t exist, because there wasn’t any “rain on the earth,” and there wasn’t any “man to cultivate the ground.”
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
