Dear Church family,
I felt really sad to miss out on our Church gathering yesterday. It’s always a difficult decision for me to make. There is almost nothing I hate more than staying home from Church, especially as a pastor. But I’m sure you didn’t want what I had to offer. It wasn’t preaching; it was puking!
Enough said. Fortunately I am feeling better today, although my family continues to endure this germ warfare. Seasons of sickness remind me of our need for a new earth and new bodies where germs don’t infect us or inflict us, a world pre-Genesis 3.
Lord willing, I’ll preach one more message in Genesis 2 before we get to Genesis 3 which describes the sinful and antagonizing world that we know today. But Genesis 2 is still perfect. But even though Genesis 2 has come and gone, there are timeless principles, eternal designs, and unchanging characteristics of God that we see on display. Please allow me to elaborate on two of them:
1. The Unchanging Character of God: He is our good Creator and Provider. God has created everything, and He created it good (Gen. 1). And in Genesis 2, we see God providing good things for earth and for man.
First, God provides for the earth (2:5-7). Earth has a problem. It has nobody to cultivate its plants. So God provides for the earth by creating man from it. Literally, God forms “adam” (man) out of the “adama” (ground). But what I love seeing is how God provides for earth by making man but also provides for man from the earth as man came out of the earth and would be fed through the fruit of earth. There’s a symbiotic relationship here.
Second, God will provide for man. Man has a problem. He has nobody to help him cultivate the earth and exercise dominion over it. So God provides for man by creating woman from him (2:18-24). Notice that God is providing for man in the same way that He provided for earth by forming the woman out of the man just like God formed man out of the earth.
Again, just like we see God providing for earth with man and man with earth, we see God providing man with woman and woman with man. The man needs the woman to help him and the woman needs the man, since she was formed from him. And just like there is a play on words in Hebrew between man and ground (adam & adama), there is also a play on words between man & woman in v23, as man is called “ish” in Hebrew and woman is called “isha.”
Now why is all of this vitally important for us?
2. We were made to be creatures of dependance.
Notice how in Genesis 2 God made the created order dependent on one-another. God provided for us in such a way where we depend on His provision through the provisions of earth. In other words, we were built to depend on the material universe with all of its elements. Man depends on earth and man depends on other human beings for his life.
This kind of dependance has been illustrated for me recently.
In the last few weeks, I’ve had several things break down that showed me how much I depend on planet earth! First, my water pump broke, and I couldn’t even flush my toilet, take a shower, wash my hands, do the laundry, wash the dishes or do anything hygienic. It felt like my whole house was broken.
Then the next week, my electricity goes out for 6 hours. You can’t do anything without electricity. You can’t see, your water eventually won’t work, your heat doesn’t work, you can’t charge your phone, etc…the list is endless.
And then, last weekend, my laptop battery died. I depend on my laptop to accomplish tons of work. I felt crippled without it.
In other words, I am so dependent on modern inventions (cultivated earth).
But then there is family dependance. If I didn’t have my wife, I think my whole world would fall apart because she is my helper and my better half. (That’s an understatement…she’s my better 9/10th’s!).
What I just explained is Genesis 2. God created us to depend on earth and depend on human relationships. While it’s possible that we may grow too dependent on these things, it’s actually not wrong that we depend on things. God created us this way and the whole world would recognize it.
But unfortunately, what the whole world does not do is depend on their Creator who set up all of our dependent systems. And that’s a shame.
And it’s also our problem too. If we want to boil sin down to one of its essential ingredients, it’s depending on creation but not on our Creator.
That’s our default setting. And coming out of Genesis 2, we should recognize the creative design of planet earth. Everything is dependent on everything (an ecosystem). If one species goes extinct, another species will too, and something else will go wrong because this whole world is built codependent, and that’s okay.
However, we so quickly forget that God is the Provider behind all of this, and we need to look to Him ultimately as the One Who creates the things that meet our needs. This is why in the Lord’s prayer Jesus said to pray, “give us today our daily bread.” We need bread. We need that grain to grow from the ground. We need the rain to water it. But we need God to send the rain. And ultimately, God made the grain. God made the soil. God made the rain. Therefore, we should depend on Him.
Dear Church, I pray that you would depend on God to provide for you all that you need. We are needy creatures through and through, but let’s not forget to give credit to the One Who set up the whole system. He is our Creator, Provider, and the One that we must remain dependant on to provide us with all of the other things that we depend on for survival.
Most of all, we should remember that we need God’s provision of Jesus (John 6) Who is our Bread of Life and Living Water. He gives us eternal life while everything else that we depend on will give us temporal life. So let’s not just depend on God for our food, our smartphones, or our relationships, let’s depend on Him for eternal life, and continue to do it.
He is a magnificent Provider in every way, and I pray that you see it.
With love in Christ,
Aaron
P.S. Stay healthy and if you don’t, depend on God to provide medicine. It comes from plants, so again, God’s earth comes to our rescue to meet our needs (Check our Revelation 22:2 for ‘new earth medicine’).
