Genesis Archives - Page 6 of 7

Spiritual Disciplines III: Work

Joe Harby on March 17, 2013

Introduction

God breathed the breath of life in Adam, and he became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). Having created him as a living soul, He gave him an abundance of food to eat (Gen. 1:29). The third thing that happened was that God gave him a task (Gen. 2:15). His immediate task was to tend the Garden, and his long term task was to subdue the entire earth. So there we have the full curriculum of the spiritual disciplines—breathe, eat, work.

The Text

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:27-28).

Summary of the Text

Notice that the creation of man as male and female was essential to the task that was later assigned. First, mankind as male/female is how we bear the image of God (v. 27). Mankind was given dominion over the earth as the vice- gerent of God, and if we are stopped and asked what authority we have for doing this or that, we must show our papers. And what are those papers? The answer is the fact that we bear the image of God. All attempts by evolutionists to deny that we are created in the image of God are either attempts to abdicate the task entirely, or are attempts to usurp the authority from God, and to rule in our own name. It is usually the latter.

The dominion and stewardship that Adam was called to exercise was absolutely dependent upon the wife he was given. Prior to Eve’s formation from the rib, he could have been told to trim a bush, or cut a path, or build a monument. He could have done such things by himself. But the globe was always going to be enormous, and Adam would have remained a solitary guy. The command was to be fruitful and multiply. How could Adam do that by himself ? He could not. If Adam was commanded to dig a hole, he could have figured out a way to do it. But he was commanded to replicate himself.

A True Image

This is why incidentally, the whole debate over homosexual marriage is an instance of high rebellion, and is not just a public indulgence of a petty vice. In response to such follies, our task is to present the image of God accurately, as well as to present a living model of Christ and the Church. We have the privilege, in our marriages, to testify both to creation and redemption. Marriage is high theology.

The Cultural Mandate

Man therefore has a right to tend and supervise what is happening on the earth. Good stewardship is our responsibility, assigned by God. This awesome responsibility was made much more difficult and complicated when our race fell into sin. The task was now far beyond us, but the task was not removed from us. After the judgment of God that fell on the earth with the Flood, this cultural mandate was repeated (Gen. 9:1). Despite our sin, we still have all the same responsibilities. Because this is our house, we are the ones who have to mow the lawn.

But God saw our inabilities and promised a Messiah, one who would enable us to fulfill and discharge the responsibility that He gave to us. Even after the Fall, the psalmist is amazed at the dominion responsibility that God gave to man (Ps. 8:6). And the author of Hebrews notes that it was not until Christ came that the true fulfillment of this was even remotely possible (Heb. 2:8-9). We do not yet see everything subject to man, the way it ought to be, but . . . we see Jesus.

A Caution

Unconverted men do not want to follow God’s order. They want to be saved “by works,” which means ultimately, that they believe the order is work, live, eat. But we are not saved by good works, but rather we are saved to good works (Eph. 2:8-10). God gives life first, strength second, and the task last. To this I labor, Paul says, struggling mightily with the energy He supplies (Col. 1:29). And in another place he says that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in us, to will and to do according to His good pleasure (Phil. 2:12-13). Work out what God works in—that is, life and strength. Lots of good works, but no autonomous good works. It is all grace.

Another Caution

As we exercise stewardship, we have to be extremely careful to pay attention to the boundaries of our stewardship, which are marked out by God in the institution of private property (Ex. 20:15). Just the prohibition of adultery presupposes the institution of marriage, so also the prohibition of stealing presupposes the institution of private property. And the state has no more right to confiscate property willy-nilly than the sultan has the right to gather up his nation’s wives into his harem.

Man in Microcosm

Adam and Eve are the paradigmatic couple. The way they got married sets the pattern for all mankind—a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and the two become one flesh (Matt. 19:5). Paul applies this to the matter of calling and vocation as well (1 Cor. 11:8-9). The man was made for the task, and the task of the woman was the man. The man tends the garden, and the woman tends the man. These are not watertight categories, obviously, but Scripture does describe this authoritatively as being our foundational orientation.

Baskets of Fruit are Heavy

Now the thing that we are to take away from this pattern of breathe, eat, work is that the task of mankind is that of management. We do not create wealth ex nihilo—we manage it as it comes off the tree. We are stewards of a multiplying world.

This world needs to trimmed, managed, shepherded, replenished, and we are to do it in the name of Jesus and a good amount of sweat. The institution of work is a pre-fall institution, just like marriage is. We are to learn how —in Christ—to resist and overcome the effects of the Fall on our labors. And the more we do, the more it multiplies.

Spiritual Disciplines II: Eat

Joe Harby on March 10, 2013

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Introduction

So there are three imperatives we are considering as we look at the spiritual disciplines. They are breathe, eat, and work. We have already seen the need for the gift of breath, and we will now look at the charge to eat.

The Text

“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” (Gen. 2:16-17).

Summary of the Text

As we have considered, Adam was shaped from the dust of the ground. Eve was therefore a granddaughter of the soil, taken from the side of Adam, just as Adam had been taken from the side of the earth. After he had been shaped, God breathed into him the breath of life. Once he had become a living soul, it became apparent that this living soul would need ongoing sustenance. Here in our passage, the Lord God gave him all the food in the garden, with one exception. He was not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but every other tree was free and available to him. This included, incidentally, the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). That tree was only shut off to him after the Fall, most probably as an act of mercy. But the simple need for food in an ongoing way is plainly a design feature, unrelated to sin.

God Gives the Increase

The gift of physical life is sustained by the gift of physical food. Man was created an eating creature. So in the same way, spiritual life is sustained by spiritual food. Life seeks out food, and life incorporates food. But how food is able to do what it does is a grand mystery. Although this passage is about a plant being nourished and growing as a result, the principle is the same for all living things. “So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase” (1 Cor. 3:7). You don’t eat a sandwich and then set aside the next half hour for issuing commands down to your digestive system to make sure everything goes where it needs to. That part of it is built in. You just put food in, and life does something with it. How? God gives the increase.

The Menu

So just as a living body needs to import nutrition, so also does the soul. We have already considered the reality of it. But what are we supposed to eat to nourish our spiritual lives? In what ways are we instructed to feed?

Another way of asking this is to wonder what menu God has prepared for us. Here are some of the key items that feed us.

The Word of God feeds us. Man does not live by bread alone (Matt.4:4), but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We are called to eat teaching, eat doctrine—and not sporadically either (Heb. 5:14; 1 Pet. 2:2).
The sacraments feed us. They are explicitly described for us as spiritual food (1 Cor. 10:1-4; 16). We are instructed to take care that we eat in a particular way, but when we do, we are nourished by Christ Himself.
Music feeds us. We are to teach and admonish one another by psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). This is clearly a combination because the words are the Word of God also, but God wants us to feed on the Word while singing it.
Prayer feeds us. We too often think of prayer as outlay instead of intake. But Jesus said that prayer understood properly strengthens rather than drains (Mark 9:29).
Doing the will of God feeds us. The Lord told His disciples that He had nourishment that they didn’t know about (John 4:31-34). He told them this after He had ministered to the woman at the well.
And fellowship feeds us. We see this as one of the things the new believers on Pentecost naturally sought out (Acts 2:42).

Balanced Diet

We have made the point that healthy life doesn’t need “hungry lessons.” At the same time, if you established all your physical eating habits as a small child, you might now be subsisting on a diet revolving around deep-fried Oreos. This is the way of the libertine. But there is also the legalist, the one who wants to be put right or kept right with God by means of some healthy sounding thing that you can sprinkle on your salad, like pine bark shavings.

Use the dining table to illustrate the point about your Bible reading, or any other form of spiritual grazing. Why do you eat? For most people, you should eat for two basic reasons—first, because you are hungry, and second, because its dinner time. Why do you need other reasons? And if other reasons are front and center, you are probably over-thinking it.

Christ in All of It

So we feed on the Word of God. Christ is the Word (John 1:1). We are nourished by the sacraments—but the Old Testament saints are said to have been nourished by Christ. They drank Christ; they ate Christ, the bread from Heaven (1 Cor. 10:1-4). We are baptized into the death of Christ (Rom. 6:3), and we are made partakers of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10:16). We sing Christ (Col. 3:16). Christ prays for us (Rom. 8:34), and whenever we pray, we are praying in Christ. Because we know it is true that of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, we offer our bodies a living sacrifice, which proves and establishes the will of God (Rom. 12:1-2). This nourishes us. The fellowship we enjoy with one another is fellowship that is grounded in walking in the light as He is in the light (1 John 1:7). In short, it is Jesus everywhere.

Spiritual Disciplines I: Breathe

Joe Harby on March 3, 2013

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Introduction

We are going to be spending this week and the next two on the subject of the spiritual disciplines. I am putting them together as three imperatives—breathe, eat, work. When God put Adam into this world, He gave him the breath of life, He gave him food to eat, and He gave him work to do. This is the pattern we should receive from Him as we seek to order our lives rightly.

The Text

“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 soul” (Gen. 2:7).

Summary of the Text

Although we were created and fashioned in the image of God, it remains a fact that we are utterly dependent creatures. The Lord God shaped and fashioned man out of the dust of the ground. When He was done “sculpting,” He had a very fine statue, but still lifeless. God then breathed the breath of life into His work. At that moment Adam became a living soul. And ever since that first breath, if God ever takes His breath away, all creatures, man and animal alike, return necessarily to the dust of the ground (Ps. 104:29-30).

The Meaning of Death

Our physical life is a spiritual reality, but we all recognize that there is more to our spiritual lives than just physical breathing. But we know that non-Christians have souls, for example. What do we have that they do not?

In the Bible, death refers to separation more than it refers to simple cessation. In the Garden, God told Adam that the day they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they would die (Gen. 2:17). But what happened when they did? They were exiled from the garden, separated from the communion with God that they had enjoyed before (Gen. 3:24). And when Adam died physically, 70 years shy of a millennium later, what happened was that his soul and his body were then separated (Gen. 5:5). The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), which means that because we are sinners, we are separated from God, estranged from Him (Col. 1:21).

This is why is says in Ephesians that when we were non-Christians we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1), in which trespasses we used to walk (Eph. 2:2). That is the biblical picture—dead but walking around. So the death cannot refer to a condition of being like stone, or like nothing. It refers to separation.

And when we are quickened in regeneration, we are made alive spiritually. Now the soul and spirit can be very hard to distinguish (Heb. 4:12), but there is a difference. Someone who is truly regenerate is quickened in the inner man (2 Cor. 4:16). “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses” (Col. 2:13).

The Word for Spirit

The word for spirit in Greek is pneuma. Interestingly, that is also the word for wind, and it is also the word for breath.

“The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma]” (John 3:8).

The Lord’s whole point here is designed to make us aware of how utterly sovereign the Holy Spirit is. We cannot whistle Him up. On a windy day, you cannot capture some in a paper bag to take home and show everybody. We cannot manufacture aerosol cans that will spray someone with the breath of life. This is outside of our control.

Gotta Be Alive

The spiritual disciplines all work within an assumed context of life.

But an entire religious industry has sprung up trying to make food attractive to corpses, and trying to get dead bodies to contribute more than they do.

One of the most remarkable things about life is that it incorporates, naturally and readily, the things around it that are conducive to its well-being.

But think for a moment about this. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). Healthy babies are born hungry—you don’t have to teach them to be hungry. Their hunger is a sign of life. They have been given the breath of life. “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, ESV). There it is again—born hungry.

Impressive Activity, But . . .

People who are separated from God, who are not in fellowship with Him, can do an impressive number of things that have a religious nature. They can give their bodies to be burned, and they can help the poor (1 Cor. 13:3). They can speak with the tongues of men and angels (1 Cor. 13:1). But, despite all of this activity, the whole enterprise amounts to a bunch of nothing.

In fact, climbing the highest mountain and swimming the deepest sea is what the unregenerate (but religious) man wants to do. It is an impulse that makes good sense to him, and doing anything else doesn’t make sense to him. When Naaman came to Elisha to be healed, the simplicity of the assigned task infuriated him. But his servants wisely observed that if he had been told to do some great thing, he would have done it (2 Kings 5:13). And why? Because great deeds flatter us. Receiving grace as beggar supplicants does not flatter us.

Where It Begins

There are no spiritual disciplines for creating life. Only the gospel creates life. Once given, life incorporates nutrients. Life seeks out nutrients. Life bends its entire nature toward that end.

So the first spiritual discipline is checking for a pulse. The first spiritual discipline is making sure you are alive. Breathe.

And to be alive, the God of Heaven must breathe His Holy Spirit into you.

The Confidence of Abraham

Joe Harby on June 3, 2012

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The Gospel and Abraham

We already considered last week how it was that the Abrahamic covenant, the promises that God made to Abraham in Gen. 12, 13, 15, 17, and 22, were all just an early version of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul quotes Gen. 15, the passage that we will focus on this morning, in Romans and in Galatians and treats Moses’ words as the Gospel. This morning we will focus just on Gen. 15 and see how it is that this passage can teach us more about our faith.

Confidence

In this passage God had already promised blessing to Abraham through a land given to his seed, but Abraham can’t figure out how that could happen, given that he has no children (15:2-3). God tells Abraham, “Trust me. It is going to happen” (15:4-5). And Abraham trusts him (15:6). But then Abraham asks for something else, he asks “How shall I know?” (15:8). He has already believed God. But he asks for a follow up. “Make me confident in this promise.” Given that the promise to Abraham was a promise of the Gospel, perhaps you can sense a parallel with your own faith. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark. 9:24). It is sometimes easy to see something as true in the abstract, but difficult to have confidence that it is true for you.

The Weapon of Uncertainty

From a human perspective, religious confidence is a dangerous thing. In Islam, there can be no such thing as assurance of salvation, because it would make you recklessly sinful. And many people accuse Christians in general, and Reformed theology in particular, of this very thing. We are tempted to act this way as parents sometimes. But God wants us to be certain, to know, to have assured confidence.

God’s Oath

In this passage, God answers Abraham with a bizarre ceremony (15:7-11, 17). God is enacting a self- maledictory oath with Abraham. A malediction is a curse. And a self-maledictory oath is where you invite a curse upon yourself in order to make an oath sure. Walking between the animal halves signified that what had been done to the animals would be done to you if you broke the covenant. There are many examples of this sort of covenant in the ancient near east literature. And the prophet Jeremiah draws on this in Jer. 34:18- 20. Jesus is probably referring to a covenant like this when he describes the curse on disobedient Israel (Mat. 24:51). In fact, this ceremony is so integral to forming a covenant that the Hebrew verb used for making a covenant is actually the verb “to cut.”

But what is exceptional about the ceremony in our passage is that Abraham does not walk between the animal halves. Instead, a smoking oven and a burning torch pass through. This image of smoke and fire is a representation of the presence of God through the Holy Spirit. When God came to Israel on Mt. Sinai, his Spirit came in smoke and fire (Ex. 19:18). And when he led the Israelites through the desert, his Spirit did so with a cloud by day and fire by night (Ex. 13:22, 40:38). This is God’s Spirit, taking the oath, taking the curse upon himself. This is how God makes Abraham sure.

The Promise of the Spirit

In making this oath, God invited a curse upon his own Spirit if he failed to fulfil his promise to Abraham. And with that Abraham could be confident. But notice that this is how God regularly deploys his Spirit – to make us confident. Consider Eph. 1:13-14. What is the point of a down payment or a guarantee? What happens if the one giving the guarantee then backs out of the deal? The deposit is forfeited. This is what God has done with the Holy Spirit on our behalf. If God fails to save those onto whom he has poured out his Spirit, then the Trinity would be ripped asunder. Can that happen? No. Then God’s saints can’t be lost. “Now he who established us with you in Christ and has anointed us is God, who also has sealed us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:21-22).

God has given his Spirit as a guarantee of his promise. He has done so corporately to Israel in the Abrahamic covenant and in the Exodus, and to the church at Pentecost, guaranteeing the fulfilment of his promises to Abraham, now being fulfilled in the Great Commission. And he has given his Spirit to each individual believer as a promise of his coming inheritance of eternal life (Rom. 8:9-11).

Confidence

If God just wanted us saved, he didn’t have to do this. And, calculating according to the flesh, he shouldn’t have done this. It was reckless. But the Spirit is a member of the Trinity. And the attributes of the Spirit, the personality of the Spirit, are a part of God’s character. God is a confident God, as his Spirit reveals. And as a confident God, he wants confident people. “Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure” (2 Pet. 1:12).

God does not delight in seeing you squirm with doubts. But this is often what we think. Satan is the accuser. Satan is the one that wants to see God’s people wonder if his promises are really true, really certain.

But God wants his people confident.

Father Abraham

Joe Harby on May 27, 2012

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Introduction

God’s covenant with Abraham unfolds in the course of several episodes in the first half of Genesis. In Gen. 12:1-3, God first called Abram in Haran and announced his promise to him. Here he commanded Abram to move forward to a new land in faith, forsaking the life that he once knew, and as a result God would bless him so that he would become a great nation, a nation that would bless the entire world, a nation that would eventually topple all who stood against it. God repeated and expanded on this promise to Abram several times in the following chapters – Gen. 13:14-16, 15:5, 17:1-8 and 22:17-18. In Gen. 17, as God once more renewed this covenant with Abram, he gave two signs of this covenant to Abraham: he commands Abram to be circumcised (17:9-27) and he renames Abram, changing him from Abram to Abraham (17:5).

Abraham

Abram’s name originally meant – “Father is exalted.” Remember that he was born in Ur and, according to Josh 24:2, his father worshipped the pagan gods of Ur. Therefore, it is likely that this “exalted father” was not necessarily God the Father. But God changed Abram’s name, making him a new kind of father. He added the Hebrew word hamon to his name. Our English translation renders this as “many nations.” This is accurate as the translation of the passage into Greek in Rom. 4:17 shows us. However, it is a very mild translation of a very vivid image. Hamon specifically refers to a noise.

The Promise

This image is consistent with the promises of God to Abraham that pile up throughout Genesis. Consider a brief overview of the covenant with Abraham.

First we see the continued promise that this was something that would be realized through Abraham’s children. This was surprising to Abraham because when the promise first came (Gen. 12 and Gen 15), Abraham had no children because his wife was barren. But the promise was that Sarah would give him a son. Even when Abraham’s name was changed (Gen. 17), he still had not had a son by Sarah and was hoping that the promise could be realized through Ishmael. But God promised that this great blessing would come through Abraham’s children.

Second, we see that this was a promise of blessing. God promised Abraham “I will bless you” (Gen. 12:2) “blessing I will bless you” (Gen. 22:17). But the way that God would bless Abraham was by turning Abraham into a blessing for the world.
“I will bless those that bless you, and I will curse him who curses you” (Gen. 12:3). God sends his covenanted people into the world and those that receive them with blessing receive also the blessing of God’s covenant, with the result that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3, cf. 22:18).

Third, we see that the promise went from a single seed to innumerable descendents, from a single nation, to all nations, from a single land, to all of the world. “I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you” (Gen. 17:6)
“In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).

“In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).

And they would be an innumerable host. “And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then you descendants also could be numbered” (Gen. 13:16). ‘Then he brought him outside and said, ‘Look now toward the heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.’ And he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’” (Gen. 15:5). “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore” (Gen. 22:17).

The New Testament

But the authors of the New Testament reveal to us that there is even more to this promise. First, the Apostle Paul tells us in Gal. 3:8-9 that this covenant with Abraham was actually the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When Abraham got up and left his family, left his people, left his country and went where God told him to go, that was him hearing the Gospel. And when you receive the Gospel, you receive the same blessing, which he received, and you become that same blessing to the world.

Second, Paul argues here that not only was Abraham receiving the same Gospel which we receive, he also says that Abraham received that Gospel the same way that we receive it – through faith. In Gal. 3:6 and in Rom. 4:3, he points out that Abraham received this promise, not by works of the law, but by believing in it just like us. “So then those who are of faith are blessed with believing Abraham” (Gal. 3:9).

Third, Paul argues in Rom. 4 that not only did Abraham receive the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but we have also received the promises that were given to Abraham (Rom. 4:16). Who is the seed of Abraham? Those who have his faith. And those who have an Abrahamic faith, have the Abrahamic promises.

Abrahamic Faith

This means that back when we were trying to understand what it meant for Abraham to be promised that his descendents would be hamon nations and we were imagining the army getting suited up for battle, we were picturing ourselves. We are the blessing to the world, because we carry the Gospel to the world. “Go, make disciples of all the nations” (Mat. 28:19).

This means that we are an advancing force. Abraham was promised, “your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies” (Gen. 22:17). That only happens when you are marching on your enemies’ strongholds. When Rebekah left to marry Isaac, here brothers prophesied of the blessing that she was stepping into “Our sister, may you become the mother of thousands of ten thousands; and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate them” (Gen. 24:60). And Jesus, knowing that his church was the seed that inherited this promise said of the church “the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Mat. 16:18).

So in the week to come think about where God has put you on offense. Where can you advance this week? You are called to be a blessing to the world. Where do you have opportunities to be that blessing? Where is the world encountering you and having to make up its mind as whether it will respond to you with blessing or cursing?