Imago Dei Series: Echoes Of Eden - Genesis 4-11

I just took Micah's.

Yeah, there we go.

Excellent.

Well, welcome back to our Amago Day series.

Last week we looked at the fall and the fracturing of our mirror, of our ability to reflect God.

Tonight is going to be similar to that.

We're going to look at the echoes of Eden.

And let's let's pray together.

Father, we do pray that you'd give our attention to your word that we might receive it well, understand more about ourselves, this world, and you.

And Father, to be able to find our hope and our fulfillment in you, our living God.

And we pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.

You ever have a moment in your life where you've been pulled outside of yourself?

Uh, when you've been so filled with a sense of wonder and awe that you wish you could just live in that moment and never lose it again.

I've experienced that several times, and one of them uh was a beautiful time driving with Royal uh through Vermont.

We lived in Boston, and uh the church I was converted at was in Plattsburgh, and so we'd make our way up through the Green Mountains and driving through the Green Mountains of Vermont and into the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and just seeing a guy who sort of landed in Illinois where uh an anthill is about the biggest thing that we had in southern Illinois, and to see the mountains and uh the the just the movement of all the various shades of of the different ranges as they layered upon each other as the sun was setting.

He used to bring my heart to places of delight and song.

Oh Lord my God, when I an awesome wonder consider all the worlds thy hands have made.

And I would I wish I could have just captured that moment.

Or maybe a piece of music that you've listened to and it's just lifted you out of yourself.

Or perhaps a time at the end of a day in the quiet stillness of the evening where it just seems so calm and serene and peaceful.

You think I don't I don't want to I don't want to move from my chair here.

I just want this to stay just like this.

Well, whatever form that might take in your experiences, all of them point to something.

They make us lean in, that there is something that draws us to beauty, that draws us to transcendence, that draws us to tranquility.

C.

S.

Lewis talked about this in his book, The Weight of Glory.

He talks about the beauty, and he says something this.

He said, the books that we read or the music in which we thought the beauty was located, they'll betray us if we turn to trust in them.

It was not in the book or in the music itself, it came through the book and through the music.

These things, the beauty of the memory of our past, are the good images of what we really desire.

Did you hear what he just said?

The memory, the beauty, the memory of our own past are the good images of what we really desire.

But if they are mistaken for the thing itself, the book or the music or the mountains, in my case, we'll turn them into idols, breaking the hearts of us, the worshipper.

For they're not the thing itself.

They're only the scent of a flower that we have not found, the echo of a tune we've not heard, news from a country we've never yet visited.

Lewis wasn't trying to be poetic simply for poetry's sake.

He was trying to explain something about the ache within us that is at the same time and in the same place familiar and foreign.

In those moments, we're longing for a world we've never yet lived in.

And it's not just simply desire, and I would say it's also memory.

And that's what Lewis was saying.

It's an echo, if you will, of Eden as it was, etched into the human heart, where all of us carry that visceral memory of what we were created for and what we actually lived in at one time.

We were made for fellowship, for worship, for glory, for communion.

And even if we can't name it, we feel it.

Every ache in our culture, every fracture and longing for more in our relationships, every fullness we experience in the moments of music and beauty, every ache of futility in the work that we do, all of them express an echo of Eden.

We sense in ourselves that life is just meant to be fuller, that our relationships are meant to be richer, that our work is meant to be more satisfying, and that our worship is meant to be more natural than it is.

But instead of harmony, we find conflict, and instead of joy, we find ourselves in futility and frustration, and instead of clarity, we end up often confused.

Even our greatest advancements, our cities, our technologies, our art, our progress, they all speak a promise.

And then we need technology 2.0.

They hint at what we were made for, and yet they fall short of what we long for.

We find that somewhere we have cracked the mirror.

We have bent the violin.

We have left the masterpiece unfinished.

We think, we create, we build, but our reason is misdirected, our creativity is twisted, our communities are fractured.

What remains are echoes of Eden.

Longings for what was lost, groanings for what we hope may come.

And so this is the remarkable thing.

These echoes are not meaningless, and they're not simply groanings, they're not random.

They're God's designation within us to put us into the place of having a driving force of yearning that will lead us not to be satisfied with the things as they are, but to reach for and to hope for and to long for something different and something better.

The ache is meant to be a witness and it's meant to be an invitation to us.

Don't be satisfied with life as it is.

So tonight we're gonna listen for those echoes.

We're gonna listen for the ways that creation and conscience and beauty and even our own longings point back to that world that God made and what we lived in and forward to the world that God is restoring.

We're gonna listen for the ways that the ache itself becomes a signpost, sometimes quiet, but always persistent and very honest, telling us that our story actually did begin in beauty and that God who made us has not walked away.

So let's listen to the story clearly.

And in order to hear the echoes, we first of all have to land in the place where those echoes come from.

We have to go back to Eden itself.

And we've done this several times in our series and the Imago Day series.

We've gone to these first couple chapters of the book of Genesis and we've traced those steps.

But let's revisit it again just briefly.

And I I want, for time's sake, simply to highlight two of the many different things that we could bring out of this.

Let's go back to Eden, chapter two of Genesis.

Here in Genesis chapter two, we see that the pace of creation slows.

Chapter one, God said and it was.

God said and it was.

God said and it was.

Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six, Genesis two slows the pace down.

And we're invited to linger.

We're invited not only to just reflect on the fact of human creation, humanity's creation before God, but also to feel it.

The Lord forms a man from the dust of the ground and breathes the very breath of life into him.

And what does he do with him?

He puts him in a garden.

Not a wasteland, not a wilderness, but a place of order and beauty and abundance.

And God says to him that he has caused every tree to grow that was pleasing in appearance and good for food.

And there in the garden, beauty and utility were matched together in perfect harmony.

It was a place where nothing was in competition.

And God places the man in that garden, as it tells us in this chapter, to work it and to watch over it.

And there, in those moments, work was not a burden but a joy.

It was an expression of rulership rightly expressed, wise, attentive, and fruitful stewardship.

The world responded to humanity's touch because humanity's touch reflected the Father's care.

Within this garden, however, we're told that there's something missing.

Even at these days of goodness, God declares that it's not good for man to be alone.

Now that sentence ought to stop us cold.

How not good?

Wait a second.

There's no sin, there's no fall, there's no degradation, there's no death.

Not good?

What's not good?

Well, in chapter one, God says, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good.

Man being by himself?

Not good.

Not because the man was deficient in anything, but that the image of God was designed to be reflected in community of male and female.

Together displaying God's character, together displaying his ways, together reflecting and fulfilling his purposes.

You see, before the fall, companionship wasn't a remedy for loneliness as it is often yearned for in our day.

It was the completion of design.

Adam wasn't pining here, he wasn't wandering the garden feeling incomplete.

If I could only find a spouse, he was fulfilling his calling.

He was naming the animals, he was working the soil, he was walking with God.

But in all of that goodness, something was unfinished.

And so the man alone could not reflect the relational nature of the God who made him.

And so man could not image God as a solo portrait in the garden.

It needed to be a shared likeness.

And so God forms the woman, not from the dust, but from Adam's own side.

And doesn't just gather her from the dirt or simply put her together in the same way that he put Adam together.

It says that he shaped her with the word that in the Hebrew would speak of artistry and artisanship.

The language is intimate and intentional.

Eve is not taken from Adam's head to rule over him, nor taken from his feet to be trampled on by him, but taken from his side, close to his heart, equal in dignity, and sharing the same breath of life.

And when Adam sees her, he speaks poetry into the world for the very first time.

He looks at her and says, Wow, this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken from man.

The world that was already beautiful had in Adam's eyes just become even more beautiful.

The harmony of creation is now richer, fuller, and complete now that there's male and female in the image of God.

This is the first human community, the first covenant bond, the first picture of unity and diversity.

It's the image of God refracted through two lives intertwined together in perfect communion.

Together, they would think and discern and cultivate and protect and expand and multiply and worship.

Together, they would embody the relational fullness of the God who existed eternity, Father, Son, and Spirit, in eternal love and harmony.

Now notice what Genesis says about that.

The man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed.

This is not a statement about clothing or the lack of clothing necessarily.

It's a statement about the absence of fear, about the absence of hiding, of the absence of self-protection.

It is the world as it was meant to be, where you could be fully known and fully safe, where you could be fully seen and still fully loved.

This was companionship before the fall.

Mutual delight without any distortion, shared purpose without any competition, vulnerability without fear or shame, unity without any eraser of the person's identity, a difference without division.

This is the world we remember.

This is the relationship our souls ache to have.

This is the echo that reverberates through all of our longings for intimacy and every desire for friendship and every grief over a fractured relationship.

We're not imagining something that's never existed.

We're remembering something we were made for.

And that's why the echoes in the world today strike us so deeply.

We know, and we know instinctively, we know intuitively, we know deeply that this life is not how it was meant to be.

We understand it.

And our souls are reaching back to that world that God made, and we're longing forward for it one day to come back.

The world as it was.

But let's talk about these echoes because we need to speak about the world as it is.

And now we go from Genesis chapter 2 to Genesis chapter 4.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention Genesis 4 · chapter mention

We turn just a just a page or two in our Bible, and the contrast is jarring.

The harmony of Eden still ringing in our ears.

And the first sound we hear outside the garden is dissonance.

The first family after Eden becomes the first reminder that the world has changed, and boy has it.

But Genesis 4 opens up with hope, doesn't it?

Eve gives birth to a son.

I've had a male child with the Lord's help.

What is that?

Gratitude?

Yes?

Even more, I think.

Expectation.

There's this faint hope that perhaps the promise of Genesis 3.15 is going to unfold quickly.

But the story doesn't move to restoration.

It moves to rivalry.

Cain and Abel, children of Adam and Eve, grow and bring their offerings to the Lord.

Abel's is accepted, and Cain's is not.

Scripture doesn't tell us everything we'd like to know about that situation, but it tells us everything we need to know about it.

Abel's offering reflects a heart aligned with God.

Cain's doesn't.

His heart is not aligned with God.

And instead of repentance, Cain turns inward.

Instead of humility, he turns toward envy, and instead of worship, he becomes violent.

And the Lord warns him sin is crouching at your door, and you must rule over it.

And there is a moment of mercy, a moment to invite him away from himself, a moment to remember Eden.

But he doesn't.

He rises up and kills his brother.

And here we see the first echo of Eden.

The relational breakdown.

In Eden, relationships marked by unity and joy and mutual delight, and outside of it, suspicion, rivalry, and competition, and bloodshed.

Brotherhood giving away to violence.

Worship becoming the very spot in which alienation grows.

Cain's envy isn't just a personal failure, and it's not just a family problem either.

It's symptomatic of a deeper fracture within all of us.

Because there's still that longing for fellowship there.

But the capacity to be able to live in that fellowship is broken.

We long for a connection, but we only find ourselves constantly going back to conflict.

We reach for harmony, find ourselves face to face with hostility.

We desire unity, but we end up creating division.

We feel it in our relationships strained marriages, fractured families, broken friendships, communities marked by mistrust, nation against nation.

Our souls remember a world.

When it wasn't like that.

When it was actually joyful to be together.

This is our story.

There's another echo of Eden.

In Genesis 4 to 11, and I just want to give you the span of those things.

You can look a little more deeply into chapter 4.

But humanity multiplies, the ache multiplies with it.

The fracture that begins with one family doesn't remain a private sorrow.

It becomes a public reality.

And what we see next in Scripture is very surprising, but also deeply revealing here.

The world outside of Eden is not fallen.

It doesn't stall there, though.

It grows, it organizes, it creates.

And as we go through Genesis 4 to 11, we see a world in motion, a world developing in culture and capability.

In chapter 4 in verse 20, we have Jebel becoming the father of those who dwell in tents and rave livestock.

In verse 21, Jubal becomes the father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe.

In verse 22, Tubalcane forges tools.

Cities are founded, and music is composed and technology is developing.

Human culture is taking shape.

And all of it reflecting in some way what God put into us.

This ability to tend this garden, to steward it, to develop it, to expand it.

But we're not expanding Eden.

We're expanding a self-centered culture.

We continue to think and design and to build.

We continue to form communities and to develop systems, but our capacity to reflect God in all of those things is gone.

Our cities are built, they become places of pride.

Music is composed, but we elevate ourselves in it.

Tools are forged, but they become instruments of harm instead of harvest.

Human progress continues, but it doesn't bring us renewal.

Our world continues to grow more and more sophisticated, but no more righteous.

Every achievement hints at our ingenuity and the capacities that God created us for.

And yet we misuse them.

And we end up lost in them.

And in this, we recognize the tension in our world.

We live in an age of extraordinary progress.

Scientific, technological, medical, artistic advance.

We can accomplish more, it seems, than any generation before us.

Yet none of us can make anything good.

None of us can heal the human heart.

None of it can restore what sin is fractured.

And Genesis 11 brings us to the arc of this.

Humanity gathered on the plain of Shinar, resolving to establish a name for themselves.

A deliberate attempt to reclaim the glory of humanity without God.

And the result is not unity or greatness, it's confusion and dispersion.

Babel then becomes the anti-Eden, in which we are left fractured and left separated instead of whole and together.

And yet Pastor John, could you switch to the pulpit if possible?

Thanks.

The pulpit?

Yes, please, thanks.

How's that?

Can you hear me?

Okay.

What did I say about technological advance?

All these things are reminders of what we were meant to be.

They're echoes of a world in which we flourished and we could fill it with things that would bring honor and glory to God.

In it, it shows an echo of Eden.

Because we really do want our creativity to be pure.

We want our communities to be whole.

We want our progress to reflect righteousness and not rebellion.

These are the words of every politician who stands up with a fresh face and says these things and will make it better until he has to be elected the next time.

It becomes the same old story.

Just like the Who song here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

Won't get fooled again.

But we do.

We get fooled again.

History is filled with all of these attempts to try to find paradise without God.

And that brings us to our third echo.

And I know this is a difficult message for us to hear, but it's it's very real and visceral for us because it is our human experience.

We go to the book of Ecclesiastes in chapter 1, in verses 2 to 11.

As scriptures moved us through the early chapters of Genesis into the wisdom literature, the scope of our ache widens, and there we see life's futility and our longing for meaning.

The book of Ecclesiastes opens with the preacher speaking, who speaks from a vantage point of someone who is wealthy enough to do everything that he desired, who's lived long enough to see everything, and who has been able in his position to accomplish everything that he's desired.

And then, through all of that effort and through all of that exploration, to recognize that a world outside Eden carries a deep weariness about it.

But it's not a weariness of physical exhaustion, it is a tiredness of the soul.

The preacher in Ecclesiastes knows that life was meant to be more coherent, more satisfying, and more whole.

He looks in chapter one at the cycles of life.

He says, generations come, generations go.

The sun rises, the sun sets, the wind circles back on itself, the streams run to the sea, only to return again.

Human effort, it fills the day, but the sense of lasting gain is outside the reach of the finger.

The work is done, but we're not complete.

Pleasure is pursued, but we're not satisfied.

Wisdom is sought, but our questions still ache in our mind.

The world keeps moving and it doesn't stop at fulfillment.

What is he doing?

Is he just simply being cynical?

No, he's being honest.

He's being honest because this world is not what it was meant to be.

Ecclesiastes gives voice to the ache that rises when we sense the gap between our experience and our design.

Made for meaningful work, made for purposeful days, made for joy that endures, made for a world where time was a gift and not a burden.

But Ecclesiastes has within it a comment we'll look at in just a moment, in chapter 3 and verse 11.

That God has set eternity in a human heart.

And that single statement explains so much of what the preacher felt as he looked at and experienced the world around him.

This eternity set in his heart was a feature because it's an imprint of Eden on his heart.

A longing for permanence, a longing for purpose, a longing for joy.

And Ecclesiastes is wrestling with this tension between the longing for what is good and lasting and the frustration of not being able to find it and to secure it.

Don't you feel that?

I know I do.

To pursue things that matter and to find your accomplishments fade or don't fulfill, to seek experiences and pleasure or enjoyment to thrill you, but it doesn't last.

To invest in relationships and find they're still fragile and easily broken?

To make a sense of your days and find that time moves you past those moments too quickly.

These aren't just disappointments.

They're longings.

They're longings.

Because we were made for something better.

Eternity was set into our hearts.

This leads us to another echo of Eden back in Genesis in chapter six.

Because the world is not only confusing, it's also corrupt.

And in chapter six, we're given a sober picture of what the human heart is like outside of Eden.

The text tells us here that the Lord saw the wickedness of humanity and that every inclination of the thoughts of the hearts were only evil continually.

Wow, is that a comprehensive statement?

Listen to how piercing it is.

The wickedness of humanity, every inclination of the thoughts of the heart were only evil continually.

Down to the very, very deepest mark of who we are is this comprehensive description that all of our capacities that were once reflecting God's goodness are still present, but the direction has changed.

Our hearts that were made to love God are now turned to love of self.

The mind that was meant to make a discernment of truth and to welcome it now drifts to deception.

The will that was there to choose the good now gravitates to the wrong.

And the passage goes on to say that this grieved the Lord deeply.

The weight of grief of a creator who knows what we were meant to be, of a father who sees children harming himself, themselves, and one another.

Genesis 6 is not just meant to show us the fracture, though.

It's meant to mark for us why we don't feel right.

Because here we're told that we can desire and not produce, we can hunger and not be satisfied, we can long and not find fulfillment.

And this is not only in expressions of work and relationship and meaning, it's also in righteousness.

And so we can admire integrity and yet not practice it.

We can celebrate acts of courage or compassion because they resonate deep within us, but then we end up hurting our loved ones.

We grieve injustices because we know they violate the way things were meant to be.

We want to be patient, but we become impatient.

We want to be generous, but self-interest pulls us inward.

We want to be truthful, but fear complicates our words, and we shadow our lie, our deceive.

We want to be faithful, but distractions crowd out our fidelity.

We feel the moral tension between what we were made for and what we are.

We long for a world in which righteousness is natural and where goodness is home.

It's the imprint of Eden on our soul.

And that leads us to the fifth echo.

Not just an echo of relationships that are broken, and all the other ones that I've mentioned, but this one, the cosmic groaning and the hope of renewal that Romans chapter 8 talks about.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

We mentioned this a little bit last week.

This this yearning reaches beyond the human heart, into the whole creation itself.

And when we reach Romans chapter 8, the ache is expanded into not only culture beyond the individuals, but it has become existential in the very creation itself.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

The fracture that began in Eden extends to the world.

The ground that once yielded fruit is now resisting, creating thorns and briars.

The harmony that once marked our relationship to creation is now straining under disorder.

The beauty that remains is real, but nature is still red in tooth and claw.

And Paul describes creation there as groaning.

It's a striking image, isn't it?

It's a way of saying that the world knows that this isn't what it should be.

The very earth is saying, we want to be back to what we were supposed to be.

Longs for a day when the children of God will be revealed, when our renewal and its renewal will come.

When the frustration that the natural world has been subjected to, decay and instability and fragility will not be the final word, but wholeness and restoration will be.

And that yearning of creation is meant to resonate in our hearts so that we stay looking forward.

This language of groaning is not meant to discourage us, but to clarify for us that we need to be looking further yet.

And so Paul speaks about hope and anticipation of the creation, longing for a day of liberation, the renewal of God's promises, becoming the realities of eternity.

This hope that's not vague or sentimental, but rooted in the very resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the beginning of the new creation, imprinting within us a longing for that day to come, and in Christ, and I'm getting ahead of myself, a security that it will happen.

And this leads us to our final echo, the most significant one, actually.

Humanity's reaching for God.

And we see this very clearly when Paul stands in Athens in the book of Acts in chapter 17.

And he's speaking to all the philosophers on the Areopagus, and he's describing something to them that's been true of every generation since we left Edom.

That humanity's been reaching.

We've been reaching for meaning, for goodness, for beauty, for justice, for permanence, no, for God Himself.

In Acts chapter 17, verse 26 and 27, he said that God has made every nation and determined their times and boundaries.

Acts 17:26

Listen, so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.

This is not a statement about a few spiritually minded people, it's a statement about the human condition.

This reaching is not merely intellectual curiosity or religious instinct.

It's the expression of a longing that's been woven into the human heart.

When we don't understand his ways, we still feel his pull.

When we don't know God's name, we still feel his absence.

And when our worship is misdirected, the impulse of worship is still intact.

As Augustine said, My heart was made for you.

My heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.

And Paul here is acknowledging to the Athenians that they were religious in every way.

And he wasn't commending their idolatry, but recognizing the longing that was beneath it.

Their altars and their philosophies were attempts to make sense of this world that feels at the same time beautiful and broken, familiar and foreign.

And this longing for God is not something we acquire, it's something we have.

We know that we were made for fellowship with God, that we feel his absence.

And we try to paper it over with achievements or relationships or pleasure or pursuits of various kinds, but they don't satisfy that deeper desire.

They quiet us for a moment, perhaps, but they don't resolve the problem.

The longing is there because it's not a longing for something, it's a longing for someone, for God.

And all the echoes gather here.

The ache in our relationships, the frustration in our culture, the weariness of our work, the tension of our moral lives, the groaning of creation itself, they all point in this one direction that we were made for God.

And we're only going to find our fulfillment when we are back into the relationship that God designed for us to have with Him.

Nothing else can satisfy the longing heart.

Paul says here, in him we live and move and have our very being.

That our existence is tied to him, our purpose is tied to him, and our hope is tied to God.

And so he shows us in Acts 17 that this longing is universal.

It cuts across cultures and languages and generations, it's present in all the questions that people ask, and all the fears people carry, and all the hopes people nurture, and all the disappointments people endure.

It's present in those moments of quiet reflection.

It's present in the restless searching that marks our life.

And I want to finish with this because in the weeks to come, we're going to answer this one and last week's.

Is that these echoes matter?

Yes, they're uncomfortable, and yes, they're difficult, and yes, they color every one of our days, but they're purposeful.

Because we were not meant to be satisfied here as it is.

We're not meant to be just left in what is just happening in the moment.

They're meant to.

Lead us to long for the one that we should be satisfied in.

Because the ache for fellowship finds its answer in the one who is willing to call sinners his children and friends.

The ache for a better world finds its answer in the kingdom that Christ brings.

The ache for meaning finds its answer in the purpose that God gives us.

The ache for righteousness finds its answer in God's grace and in his transforming power.

And the ache for renewal finds its answer in the hope of the resurrection.

The ache is meaningful, the echo is purposeful, so that we might find our answer in the only place it can be found, and that is in God through our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Because Jesus doesn't silence the echoes, he fulfills them.

He doesn't erase the longings, he completes them.

And he doesn't dismiss the aches, he heals them.

Because the story that began in Eden doesn't end in exile.

It moves through the aches, it moves through the longings, it moves through the groanings, and it arrives for those in Christ where He will make all things new.

Because the God we reach for is a God who in mercy and love and grace reaches to us.

The one whose image we bear is the one who's come to restore the image in us.

This ache is not the end of our story.

It's simply an invitation to find the real story in his story.

Let's pray together.

Move our hearts, we pray, to find all that we ache for in you.

We pray, Father, that these truths will cause us to loosen our grip on the things that we cling to to find meaning in that reside outside of your person.

To hold on to relationships and work and culture and meaning, and even the earth itself with a looser grip, and to cling to you with a tighter one, and to look to you with an eye of hope and a sense of anticipation, just as the world itself has.

This creation that has birth pains, longing for the coming day.

Father, we pray that we would find our satisfaction in that place, that only satisfaction can be found in you through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And we pray this in his name.

Amen.

Amen.