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Leni and I want to invite you to join us for a life-changing journey through the land of the Bible in April of 2027. You can walk where Jesus walked. You can worship on the Sea of Galilee. You can celebrate baptisms at the Jordan River, and we're going to share communion at the empty tomb. You'll also have the option to attend the Epicenter Summit in Jerusalem, where I'll be speaking alongside of Joel Rosenberg.
Greg Laurie, and Graham Locks, Jack Graham, and more.
So join us April 5th through April 16th. You can learn more today at ConnectWithSkip dot com slash Israel.
Now here's today's message from Pastor Skip Heitzig. And it just so happened that the amount of water to land is the ratio that it is, which gives us the rainfall that we have on the Earth. Did you know that if the oceans Were just one quarter larger than they are, we would have a flood on the Earth. It would be eight times the amount of rainfall. Life couldn't be sustained if they were just a little shallower than they are.
It would be dry all over the Earth, and we know it's dry here. It would be dry everywhere, and life couldn't be sustained.
So it didn't just so happen. It was just so designed by a designer. And the Lord God made the earth and the heaven.
So when you go outside, and maybe you'll see a star or two tonight. We have light pollution around here, and you look up and you see a couple stars or a planet. Think this: if the art hanging in the skies must be that magnificent, how magnificent is the artist behind it? That's the God of the Bible. In Genesis two.
In verse eight, the Lord God planted a garden. I love that God was a gardener. Where eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Now we don't exactly know where this is. Probably was in the Mesopotamian river valley, the river delta between the Tigris and Euphrates River. Of course, the earth was very different, but that would make it. Around Iraq, somewhere that delta, verse nine. 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. Go down to verse fifteen. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden, you may freely eat." Please notice that we always notice you can't eat that one tree, and we kind of get bummed out of God for making a rule. You can eat everything in this garden.
You may freely eat it, 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 will surely die.
Now we're going to see this in chapter five more than any other chapter in this early part, because it'll be a list of all the people who die. It'll say eight times, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died. In the day that you eat, you will surely die. Go down to verse nineteen. Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.
And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. Adam is a name. It's actually a Hebrew word, and it simply means man. That's how we translate Adam, man. But the word Adam comes from another Hebrew word, Adamah, which means dirt or soil, red soil.
It comes; they even use Adamah for red in the Hebrew language to this day, and probably because the nutrient-rich red soil of the Garden of Eden is where God took him.
So, if you look at verse nineteen, that's Adam's life. What a great job! Living in the Garden of Eden, and his job was naming animals. This is a hippy's dream. Hey, this is what people save their whole life for and look to retire after.
This is what they want to do: just hang around in a garden environment with a bunch of animals. Come on, that's living.
So he's naming animals and. I imagine. I always like to imagine that at first he was very creative and diligent, came up with these weird things like hippopotamus. That's like five syllables, man. That's long.
Or rhinoceros. And then he got a little tired. Or elephant. And then it's the end of the day, and it says like dog, cat, pig, fly. He no, not much energy.
Of course, these are English names. Chapter two, verse eighteen. Go back one verse. The Lord God said, "It is not good that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him." Verse twenty-one.
The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs. And close up the flesh in its place. Then the rib, or the side, literally, which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into a woman, and he brought her to the man. There was a Sunday school class where the teacher was telling this story—the story of creation, the story of the first man and woman. There was one little boy.
Who was just so interested in Adam and Eve and how this process worked? He'd never heard anything like this. God took a rib and made a woman, and it was his wife. And it was just so weird to him. But he's listening, and it was rapt attention.
Later on that week, little Johnny had a stomachache and was lying on his bed, and his mom came in the room, said, "Johnny, what's wrong?" And he was holding his side, and he goes, "I think I'm having a wife." It's what a kid would think in looking at the story. And Adam said, verse twenty three, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man." Now that doesn't sound all that romantic. The girl shows up, and this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Really, that's all you got.
But that's because our translation really doesn't capture the feel and flavor of the original.
So the Living Bible tried to do that and said, "And God brought the woman to the man, and Adam said, 'This is it.' And I like that translation. This is it." Yeah, bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. But this is the one. This is the helper. This is the match.
This is the one. It was from God, and He knew it. Therefore, verse twenty-four: A man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
Now we've noticed something repeated. If you were to read every single verse of these chapters, you would find out that time and time again, God says after He makes something, it was good. It was good. Chapter one, verse four, verse ten, verse twelve, verse eighteen, verse twenty-one, verse twenty-five. God says it's good.
And then in chapter one, verse thirty-one, then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.
Now, for the first time in all the Bible, God says something is not good. He looks at the at the dude. He looks him over and goes, "Something's not right.
Something's not good about this." And what it was was the state of aloneness that he was in. It is not good. That man should be alone.
So God says, "I'm going to make him a helper." Speaking of unromantic things to say, this would be high on the list.
Well, who's this? Oh, this is my helper. Try that sometime, man, and watch her reaction. Oh, really? That's what I am?
Your helper? It doesn't sound impressive. It sort of sounds like she's my assistant.
However, did you know that it is a word God used to describe Himself in Psalm 46? God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help. Same exact Hebrew word, a present help in times of trouble. Also, Psalm thirty-three: God is our help and our shield.
So God knew that this guy needed all the help he can get.
So He made her, and He brought them together. God was the first matchmaker, you might say, and we would be right to say this was a match made in heaven. God brought them together. In fact, somebody once said Adam and Eve had the ideal setup. He didn't have to hear about all the men she could have married, and she didn't have to hear about the way his mother cooked.
So you know it was just perfect.
So that is the formation, chapters one and two of Genesis. God does not go into great detail, but he covers the formation.
Now we come to chapter three through five, and this is the second great event that Genesis speaks about. And that is the fall of man. Genesis speaks about four great events and four great people. The four great people we'll look at next time, but now we come to the fall of man, chapters three through five. And chapter three gives to us the only reasonable explanation that the world is as bad off as it is today.
Every generation looks around and says, "Man." This world is so bad these days. I hear that every set of days, next generation. But the world so bad these days, next generation. These days, not like it used to be.
So just everybody acknowledges life is pretty bad. Where did it all start? The explanation is here, verse one.
Now the serpent. This is Connect with Skip Heitzig. Want to understand your Bible better without getting lost in all the details? Pastor Skip Heitzig's new devotional, Soaring Above It All, takes you through the entire Bible in one year, giving you the big picture perspective you need to see how God's story fits together. Each day offers biblical truth, practical application, and encouragement to help you grow in your knowledge of Scripture and deepen your walk with the Lord.
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Now let's return to today's teaching.
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, "Has indeed God said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" Right off the bat, we are struck with the fact that this creature, whatever it is, is markedly different from other creatures because this creature can talk and can understand human language and can dialogue with the first man and the first woman.
So. We understand that man is given one negative command. We saw that can eat of the trees of the garden, but this one tree you can't eat of.
So he's given one negative command. You know who knows? God may have even hung a sign over that one tree. It says danger, lethal tree, keep out. But what do you think when you see a sign that says keep out?
Go in. Keep out! That's for other people, not me. If it says wet paint, what are you going to do? You're going to touch it, and that's what happens.
Now, the word serpent—it's not the best word, because the Hebrew word that is used is the word nachash. Nachash means to shine, or the shining one said. That's the literal translation.
So this being, this serpent, would be best translated a shining one, which immediately, if you're a Bible student, takes you to the New Testament book of Second Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse fourteen, where Paul said. You know, you have false apostles among you who transform themselves into apostles of Christ, and we shouldn't marvel at this, for Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. He appears here as an angel of light. He didn't come with horns, a little tight red suit, a little pitchfork, going up to people, going boo. He comes as a angel of light, a shining one.
In fact, there are two Old Testament passages that describe Satan in the beginning and his subsequent fall. Isaiah chapter fourteen and Ezekiel chapter twenty-eight. In Ezekiel chapter twenty-eight, it says of this being, "You were in Eden, the garden of God." You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
Now this being, this shining one, comes and immediately, as we saw in verse one of chapter three, challenges God, challenges God's word, challenges God's motives, and right here begins the beginning. Of what we call in the New Testament the world, you've heard that term, the world, the world, the flesh, the devil. The world is a New Testament word, and the world is a system of ideas, actions, and people that are opposed to God. And it begins here as something is planted in the heart of Eve by the serpent. Verse two: The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat." The fruit of the trees of the garden, you said we can eat.
We may eat, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, "You shall not eat, nor shall you touch it, lest you die." Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die, for God knows that in the days that you eat, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took its fruit and ate it. She also gave to her husband, with her, and he ate.
Now notice something in verse six. It was good for food. It was pleasant to the eyes. It was desirable to make one wise. First John chapter two.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life are not of the Father, but they are of the world. We see them displayed in this verse.
Now you'll notice something also in verse six. Four verbs that Eve engages in: she saw, she took, she ate, she gave. For Adam, there's one. He ate. He's a guy.
He ate. Now, what you should know, what you need to know, is though that is true, Adam gets all the blame. Paul the apostle writes, First Timothy chapter two, Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived fell into transgression.
So you just got to picture Eve over there in the garden. She's just sort of listening and talking, and maybe feeling empathy for this creature, even though it's a shining creature. And she listens some more, and she engages more in conversation, and she thinks thinks about it. Adam, he knew exactly what was going on. He just ate.
It's like grunt, eat me, Tarzan. But he knew what he was doing. All that aside, though, this is the darkest day in human history. This is where all the problems began. On this day, the virus called S I N virus was introduced to the bloodstream of humanity.
You are all S I N positive. Every single human being, that beautiful baby that was just born, your little child, your little niece, her nephew—sin positive, like all y'all. And so Paul puts it this way in Romans chapter five: by one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and death spread to all. And then finally, Paul writes, death reigned from Adam to Moses. Sin entered, death entered, death spread, death reigned.
It all started here. When Adam sinned, a constitutional change was generated in human character, so that from Adam all the way down to every other generation, they would be impacted. He went from innocence to sinfulness. That was the change, the constitutional change in his character.
So Adam acted sort of like the federal head of all humans who would ever be born, and by his act, sin and death spread and entered the world. It's sort of like what happened, and I've told this story to you on a few occasions. As a kid, I went to the Grand Tetons National Park with my parents. And I was at the at the base of that beautiful lake, Jackson Lake, early in the morning, a summer morning. It was pristine, and you could see the reflection of the mountains about as clear as you could see the mountains themselves in the horizon.
But just one stone. That I threw across that lake to see how many skips that stone would make across that lake. Just the first hit, the first impact, caused ripples that marred the image of the beautiful Grand Tetons in Jackson Lake, Wyoming. What I did as a kid, Adam did for the world, for the race. He threw the stone of disobedience that has ripple effects in every single generation and distorted the image of God that we were created in.
And that answers the question: Why the world is, after thousands of years, the way it is and seemingly getting worse?
Now, in Chapter Four, we come to the first home. The first nuclear family we have Adam and Eve and their two boys Cain and Abel. Both are worshiping together. Abel's offering is accepted. Cain's is not.
Verse three, and in the process of time, literally and at the end of days, it came to pass that Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground to the Lord.
So it seems like there was an appointed place and an appointed time. For them to worship, so worship was already being organized back in Genesis verse four. Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and their fat, and the Lord respected Abel and his offering, but he did not respect Cain and his offering, and Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. You know what that means? A sad face.
You know the emoji. His countenance fell. It went from to. Bummed out. His countenance fell.
A couple of things are at play here. First of all, the quality of the offering. It is mentioned here. It says that he brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat. A better translation is he brought the first ones and the fattest ones.
In other words, he brought the very best. I'm going to bring the first ones, which also happen to be the biggest, fattest ones. I'm giving those to the Lord. I'm not keeping those for myself.
So we understand that worship giving should involve at least some amount of sacrifice. David, when he was offering something to the Lord, he offered to buy the threshing floor of Ornan. We'll get to that much later on. And Ornan said, "No, no, no. Let me give this to you.
You're going to build a temple for God, man. It's it's on me. It's yours. Have it." He goes, "No, no, no. I'm going to pay for it.
No, David, you can have it. It's for God." David said, "Listen, I'm not going to give to the Lord anything that doesn't cost me something. I've got to feel it. There has to be some amount of sacrifice.
So it was in this one. There was a quality to his offering. Second, there was the character behind the offering." You know, if we wonder why did God accept one and not the other, Hebrews eleven gives you the answer. By faith, Abel offered up a more acceptable or excellent sacrifice than Cain. And if you look at verse seven, there's a hint of that.
In verse seven, God says, "Why are you so bummed out? If you do well, will you not be accepted?" And if you don't do well, then sin is lying at the door. In other words, you're not doing well. You're not living right. And I, God, will never separate the offering from the one who offers it.
You can worship me, but I always look at the worshipper along with the worship itself. I don't just say, "Man, that guy can sing." Ooh, he's got his hands raised, and it's so loud, and he's into it. I look at the life behind it.
So both of those are at play: the quality of the offering and the character behind the offering.
So he was angry. Cain was so angry that his countenance fell, and he kills Abel. It is now the what you would call first murder. I'm calling it the second murder in history. Technically, it's the first homicide, man killing a man, but I contend it's the second murder.
The first is when Satan. Destroyed the relationship of intimacy that God had with His ultimate creation, man and woman. That was the first murder. Satan, the Bible says, was a murderer from the beginning. We're so glad you joined us today on Connect with Skip Heitzig.
Before you go, don't forget about Pastor Skip's brand new devotional, Soaring Above It All. This one-year devotional gives you a panoramic view of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Helping you better understand God's Word and stay engaged with it every day. Request your copy as our thanks when you give fifty dollars or more to help bring clear Bible teaching to people around the world. Give today at connectwithskip.com/offer or call eight hundred nine two two eighteen eighty eight.
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