At Home in God's Garden

Help us worship.

It's good to be with brothers and sisters in Christ.

It's good as we're perhaps seeking our way to God that we gather together with Christians.

It's just good to be here.

Hope you're happy to be here this morning.

I'd like to ask you to turn to the portion that Grace just read for us.

Genesis chapter 2, verses 4 through 17.

Genesis 2:4–17

We're actually beginning with verse 4, the second chapter.

Now, if you weren't here last week, that might be a little strange.

Actually, verse 4 is verse 1 of chapter 2.

The chapter division here doesn't help us very much.

The chapter divisions aren't part of the text.

This one came in the 1500s.

Story told that a guy was riding on horseback while he was marking where the chapter divisions were going to come, and his pen must have slipped or something as he was preparing the text for printing.

Chapter 1 goes up to 2.3.

Chapter 2, verse 3.

Chapter 2 begins with verse 4.

Alright, just kind of deal with it.

So we are in the first few chapters of Genesis.

The chapters which God, in a wonderful and gracious and kind way, pulls back the curtain, as it were, so that we may see some things we would know in no other way.

We were not there at the time of creation.

Moses, whom God led to write this, was not there.

The scientists were not there.

We would not know anything authoritatively about this were it not for the fact that in the beginning God, and then God graciously has revealed this, the central truth that we must understand as we are oriented in the world around us, as we we understand something of what we see, something of what we experience within, how are we to make sense of this?

Well, God kindly reveals truths about how it all began.

And when God revealed this to, in this case to Moses, he so guided the thoughts and the writings of Moses that what was written was precisely what God wanted.

And this is a miracle.

It's the miracle of what we call inspiration.

The writers of the Bible were not inspired in the sense that they saw a beautiful sunset and it was so inspiring.

No, what happens, and whether it's Moses or Matthew or John or whomever, perhaps at times without even knowing what was going on, God was so superintending the process, so guiding the process, that the end result of what we have here is not just Moses and Matthew and John and so forth, but is what God precisely wanted us to hear and to know, and in it he does not mislead us.

But the point that I really want to make this morning, as we look particularly and begin with chapter two and chapter three, is that we're finding things here that are intended to help us make sense of the world around us.

I've used the metaphor of a compass and a topographical map.

In the beginning, God, the most foundational truth.

If you miss that, if that's not at the core of the way you see the world around you, you will see incorrectly.

In the beginning, God.

But he goes on and he reveals himself as the creator, and we've seen a lot of that in chapter one.

And now he begins to reveal more and more about what the circumstances were with man.

And if we don't understand this, we will not understand ourselves, we will not understand one another, we will not understand the world around us.

So today we're looking at the first portion of that, verses 4 through 17.

It's just part of the account.

We'll look at the next portion next week, but this week we see man having been placed in the ideal situation, the ideal place for which God intended man to be.

At home.

That's significant.

At home in the garden.

God's design was that we be at home.

And we'll explain some of what that means.

Next week we'll take the next section, which builds on this as said, man is at home in the garden, but it's not good to be alone in the garden.

Man at home in the garden, man not alone in the garden.

It is not good for us to be alone.

And that reveals further things that help us orient ourselves to the reality around us.

If we're alive and breathing and thinking and feeling, we probably recognize some people are more sensitive to this than others, but there's a lot of things around us that are just very perplexing.

And part of what the first couple of chapters of Genesis are given for us is to give us a view of things that helps us make sense.

One writer put it together, much, uh expressed it much better than I can.

So let me just read a few sentences here.

What he's talking about is the very puzzling contradictions of what we see around us.

How can human life be so rich and prosperous and yet so flawed?

How can your life, on the one hand, be so rich and good and yet so flawed?

Mine is, yours is, and how did that come about?

How are we to understand that?

How can it be that human beings so much long for God and yet so insistently flee from God?

We are created to have a relationship with God.

There's something deep within us, within all human beings, that is intended to connect with God.

Pascal said there's a God-shaped vacuum inside of each of us.

We are meant for God, and there is a longing.

Sometimes it gets pushed away, vaguely aware of it for God, and yet at the same time we run from Him.

How are we to understand that?

That's the reality.

Um, how can human beings create so much that is of excellence and beauty only to find that our finest achievements are subject to decay?

Why are even the most intimate and life-giving aspects of human relationships touched with pain and sorrow?

That's the reality of the world that we live in.

That's what we see in the news, that's what we observe and hear about in the media, that's what we experience in the workplace and in our homes.

That's what we experience in here as well, these contradictions.

We can harness nuclear energy for good or evil.

We can intervene in the reproductive processes for good or for evil.

We have the knowledge and technology available for the elimination of hunger in the world, but not the political will or economic structures or personal motivation to do so.

We have developed a standard of living which allows us to concentrate on the quality of our personal relationships in a way that earlier generations knew nothing about, and yet we find ourselves unable to make personal commitments one to another.

You see, there's these contradictions.

And we're not left to our own to have a framework of understanding as we look around and as we live our lives.

Pascal again said, man's greatness and wretchedness are so evident, greatness and wretchedness of us, of mankind, that true faith, true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

Now, this is the reality, this is the context in which we live.

And the early chapters of Genesis give us an orientation to this so that we've got some tent pegs or some stakes by which we can understand things.

So that's kind of my hope as we walk through these first chapters that we'll get points of orientation in the world around us that helps us understand life, helps us understand others, helps us understand ourselves, helps us understand the human predicament.

That I believe is what the book of Genesis is all about.

Now, what he does throughout all of this in this section, in the verses that we're looking at, he orients us to our first home.

To our first home.

The Garden of Eden, where God placed Adam, placed the only man that was at that point, placed the representative man as well, a literal true man, that, as it were, in Adam all of humanity existed.

Placed us home in a garden, in Eden.

A home that was perfectly designed for us, a home for which we were destined, a home for which we were intended, and then because of sin we were cast out, and we now find ourselves far from there, and as we will see, we are going home.

We had a first home.

This is our temporary home now, but this is not our final home.

Our final home lives yet in the future.

So these kinds of big picture ideas are what these chapters are designed for us.

So what we have here, for example, is as we turn to this, we find that with verse 4, the beginning of chapter 2, verse 4, the focus now shifts.

If you think back to what we've seen up until now, the big picture has been painted.

The stage with all of its marvel and beauty of creation.

God having spoken and said, jump, and the mountains clapped their hands and said, How high! This sovereign, glorious God spoke, and it all came into being.

All that is came into being at the very word of God.

If he had not spoken it into being, it would not exist.

And there was this progression, day one, evening and morning, day two, evening and morning, day three, day four, day five, day six, and the capstone of this creative process was the creation of man.

That's the backdrop.

Now, the stage having been set in chapter one, it's as though you're watching a video or something, and I guess the instead of the whole thing being in focus, now the light shines at center stage, and what center stage comes sharply into focus.

It begins and it it accounts, recounts for us man, humanity against this backdrop.

Now God was no doubt doing many other things and is still no doubt doing many other things, but what's going on with how he holds the complex compound amino acids of our body together, how the stars are kept in space, how the black holes, what that is all about.

There's all kinds of other things that God is doing.

There may be other aspects of creation about which we have no idea, because God has brought the focus down for our benefit to us in the world that we live in.

So the focus is shifting here.

Um, they notice significant differences here, and I hope you will notice them.

Unfortunately, this has caused so-called intelligent scholars to build a hypothesis that this is a different creation account.

This is a different story, written by a different person, artificially and rather inexpertly pasted together as though, but it's really two separate stories.

This is not two stories.

Unfortunately, my first year in seminary, I spent most of a semester learning the JEDP theory of the authorship of the Pentateuch.

I had never even read the whole Pentateuch, and I had answers to questions that were really fairly foolish questions, and I didn't know what I was talking about.

Now, all of which was, there's out there in the world, there's huge arguments to say that this is an artificial, inaccurate second creation story.

It is not that whatsoever.

This, having set the full stage, now continues the story from the perspective of man.

There is a phrase which we find here with which verse 4 begins these are the generations of.

Now, that may not say to us a great deal at first reading.

As we read through the book of Genesis, this is one out of 11 times that this unique phrase is used.

And in essence, it's saying, okay, now we've just talked about this.

Here's what flows from that.

Here's what is the the genesis that gives the genesis of these other things.

For example, in chapter 5, verse 1, after having uh spoken about uh uh Adam and Eve and uh Noah, um chapter 5, verse 1, this is the book of the generations of Adam.

Here's what came out of Adam and its the descendants uh of Adam.

Uh chapter 6, verse 9, same thing.

Um and the Lord, uh chapter 6, verse 9, I have the wrong reference here.

No, there we are.

These are the generations of Noah.

Noah had been explained from Adam down to Noah, and now he says, here's what happened from that.

This probably, these eleven times that this phrase is used, probably gives the real chapter divisions or divisions in the writing of the book of Genesis.

So what he is saying to us, and I will paraphrase it this way, with verse 4 of chapter 2, here now is what happens with the earth and man with whom God was so well pleased.

So he's taking a portion of what he's already been talking about, and he'll say, here's what flows out of that.

This complements and expands on our knowledge of man that we get from chapter 1.

So it's very skillfully and wisely and beautifully put together.

There's another thing here that should be noted.

It may not be so evident at first reading.

There is a new aspect of God's character that is revealed here, and God's character is often reflected in his names.

Up until now, throughout chapter one, the name of God, and you recognize there are many different names of God that are revealed in Scripture.

This was Elohim.

This was the sovereign creator who spoke and all things came into being.

This is Elohim.

God is the great and the mighty, the one who acts and everything flows from that.

That's true, that's who God is, but that's not all that God is.

Very interesting and very beautifully now, another aspect of God is revealed.

And at this point, there's another word, and in our translations, it's the Lord God.

Up until now it's been God, Elohim.

But now it's Yahweh Elohim or Jehovah Elohim, or in many of our translations, the word Lord written with four small capital letters, if that makes any sense.

Look at the text of the Bible you have in front of you, probably has capital letters, but they're a little smaller.

It's to set that aside.

This is the God who, in addition to being the creator God, is the sovereign creator who enters into relationship with us, with his creation.

There's a new and a vital and a beautiful and precious aspect of God's character that we will see.

He does not stand far off and just fling things into space, as it were.

He takes us and he draws near and he is intimate with us, as this passage will explain.

So this is all part of the focus shifting, a new aspect of the creation account, not a different one.

There's a lot of things that we won't take a look at in this section.

Uh we don't have the time to do everything.

I probably don't have the time to do anything that I want to do this morning, but but verses five and six, for example, we're not going to look at that.

It describes the earth as it was during part of day number six, before Adam was created on day number six.

Or verses 10 through 14, which describe some of the physical features of Eden, four different rivers, of which two we think we know something about, and the other two we'd know nothing about them if it weren't revealed here.

We don't even know where they were.

Apparently, Moses and the first readers had an understanding of this, but it talks about the geography at that point that is different from what we know now.

Maybe the flood, maybe the cataclysm of the flood changed that.

We know of a Tigris River and a Euphrates river, and maybe those are the same, maybe not.

All kinds of things that we could go in and talk to, but we're going to leave those aside.

What I want us to do is look first at something incredibly significant that is said in verse 7 of chapter 2.

Then Yahweh Elohim, Jehovah God, formed the man of dust.

Formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living creature.

This complements and expands what we saw in chapter 1, verse 27.

So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him.

General statement.

Now we're seeing how that developed, how that happened.

We'll see that today and next week.

But what we find is something that's not clearly revealed in the first description of man of chapter 1, verse 27, but is very significant here.

We are we are there's two fundamental aspects of our humanity.

There is a physical, material aspect, and then there's this non-physical, immaterial aspect of who we are that you can't touch and weigh and measure.

And we'll take a look at that.

It's very significant.

This goes to the core of who we are.

So he says, um the Lord God formed the man, and the picture here, the word that is used here, we've seen it before.

It'd be like a potter with a lump of clay putting it on the pot.

He formed the man, and he took the Dust of the ground.

And there is here something very significant in the words that are being used.

He calls mankind man of dust, man from the ground.

What's significant here is that there is a very important play on words.

Ground, the Hebrew word for ground is Adama.

The name of the man that he first created is Adam.

Adam, Adama.

There's a play on word.

He was created from the ground.

That's also the personal name that is given to Adam, to the first man.

But the point being that this is a description of how God fashioned the stuff out of which we were made.

The point is that we are earthlings.

Earthlings.

We come from the earth by the creative will and intention of God.

We are earthlings.

This is our home.

The earth is our cradle, the earth is our home, and once sin enters into the world, earth becomes our grave as well.

From dust you were, and dust you to dust you shall be returned.

This goes to the core of who we are, one aspect of it, the physical aspect of it.

This ought to give us a sense of proper perspective on who we are.

We're just of dust, a sense of humility.

In fact, it's very interesting.

John Calvin, who was not known for being politically correct, did not live in a day of political correction.

I love Calvin's statements.

He said, he must be exceedingly stupid who does not learn humility from this, from this account.

You'd have to be really dense.

You'd have to be really dense to read this if you're thinking, and not say, you know, we're not much.

God is much.

We make a big deal about God.

God is worth making a big deal about.

God has greatly blessed us and he has put us in a place above all creation, but we're just stuff.

From dust we came to dust we shall return.

The earth was our first home, but it is not our final home.

At least neither the Garden of Eden nor the earth that we know today.

That was where we came from, and as we will see in chapter three, sin devastates the original creation, does not destroy it, but disfaces it.

And we no longer live in the Garden of Eden.

I don't know if you've noticed that or not.

We live with thorns and thistles in the sweat of our brow.

This is a broken place.

Tornadoes, floods.

Twenty years ago this year?

The flood here destroyed how many homes?

I mean, this is a broken world.

This is not the way it was meant to be.

And this is not for which we were created.

We were created for that.

We now have this.

But this is not our true and final home.

There is a new heaven and a new earth that is coming.

Jesus went to prepare a place for us, a literal physical place.

The first two chapters of Genesis describe our first home, a real physical place.

We now live in this lengthy period in between, and then in the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation chapter 21 and 22, we find out about the new heavens and the new earth where we will dwell forever, our eternal home.

Revelation 21 · chapter mention

So we live in this lengthy period of time between our first home and our final home, and this is not home.

You see, if we don't get this, we're disoriented.

If we don't get this, then we will think that we need to settle down here.

And because after all, this is what we're made for in this phase of life.

God's design and destiny has always been for mankind in paradise.

Paradise past, now lost.

This is not paradise.

And the new heavens and the new earth is where we're headed.

We'll come back to that thought in a little bit.

So man is made of dust, we are earthlings, and this is so beautiful.

I don't know if I can express the beauty and the tenderness about all of this.

We have been brought to life by the very breath of God.

Chapter 2, verse 7.

The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

Let's unpack that idea.

What we have is a beautiful, intimate picture of God being intimate and close with this thing of earth that he has created.

Elohim, the creator God, seems like he's far off.

I mean, we're awed, and rightfully so, with the creative power and sovereignty of God.

And yet Yahweh, Jehovah, is a God, is that aspect of God which we would miss unless it was revealed that he is drawn near.

And so we've talked about a potter and the clay.

That's a good picture, but it falls short because the potter is working with the clay at arm's length.

So it's on the wheel and he fashions it and molds it.

And it's beautiful.

There's something else that happens here.

But he doesn't stay at arm's length.

He reaches out and he takes Adam, whom he has created, and he draws near and he gets down, and he puts his face, as it were, close to Adam, and he goes.

We know what resuscitation is.

He wasn't resuscitating Adam, he was suscitating him.

This inanimate, not yet complete human being became complete by God getting down and dirty and personal, enmeshed with the creature that he is made.

One writer said he breathed in his breath is warmly personal and with the intimacy of a face-to-face kiss.

That is such a beautiful picture.

He takes this lump of clay and he becomes very intimate and tender with mankind.

First responders are sometimes called to do artificial respiration.

No, is that the right term?

Yeah.

CPR.

Okay.

There are people who would do well to get some training in CPR, and yet there's a hesitancy.

It's a very intimate thing to do.

To get to a lifeless body that's not moving, may have life, but it's not moving.

Someone you don't know, and put your mouth on the mouth of that person and breathe your breath into that body.

That is an incredibly intimate personal thing.

And there are people who would simply rather not do it.

And in a way, I can understand it, it almost seems intrusive.

But what intimacy with God who takes us and he tenderly breathes into this his creation, the very breath of life.

We might put it this way: breathed points to warmly personal face-to-face intimacy.

Not only did God have his hands dirty informing us, what condescension, but he also kissed his very life into us.

We are the recipients of the tender treatment of God's kiss and blessing.

That is as true about man as anything else.

If we don't understand this, how man and God are intimately tied together, we misunderstand things of great reality.

See, this is to get us oriented.

This is to help us understand how things really are.

And so man has these two natures, a material, but then there's this other side of man: soul, spirit, conscious, inclinations, desires, all a whole bundle of terms that the scriptures use for the non-physical parts of man that are just as important.

We are not just another animal.

We cannot be explained just by the physiology which explains part of us.

We will inherently misunderstand ourselves and other people unless we capture that man is more than that.

He is not less than a physical being, but he is more than a physical being.

Two natures of man.

Very, very important for us to understand reality.

Let's go on.

Another thing that is revealed here is that we are given a station in life.

Now, I'm going to use this in the old-fashioned sense.

Station is not just something where a train stops at.

Station has to do, in the old-fashioned sense, with your one's station in life.

We don't like to hear that kind of terminology because it suggests that we have been given an assigned place in the universe.

Well, my friends, we have been given an assigned place in the universe.

Let me try to unpack this a little bit.

My wife and I, Jane, we just finished the second time watching through the series of Downton Abbey.

I love that series.

You learn to hate Mary.

Oh, yeah, Jane says, keep going, Walt.

All right.

In Downton Abbey, it's set in a day in which one's station in life was generally understood.

So you had the aristocracy.

It's set in late Edwardian British history around the time of World War I and afterwards leading up to the end of the 1920s, where there was a sense of caste almost, or class.

So you had the landed gentry, and they have this wonderful house.

Well, they care for the estate.

They care for the people who were the farmers that were under their care, and yet they're flawed.

The gentry, they're just human beings.

There are really no better or worse than those who were in service.

Interesting statement for the people who served that house.

They were in service.

They weren't slaves.

They were in service.

We are created to be in service.

Okay?

It goes to our place.

Now, very interesting.

There was intimacy between those who were in service and the landed gentry family.

They interrelated.

And a lady's maid was an intimate of Malady.

Okay?

And yet among those who are in service, there's a pecking order.

The upstairs maids had a whole different position than the others.

So the fact of the matter, that is the way God has created reality and has created mankind.

I'm not suggesting that you can't rise above your status if above was being a landed gentry really above being someone who's in service?

I don't think so.

Now, what we find is that man's station in life, in the universe, is spelled out for us here, that we might know and understand the world around us.

First of all, there is location, and then secondly, we'll see vocation.

So let's read verses eight and nine.

And Yahweh Elohim, the Lord God, planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant for sight and good for food.

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

He is locating Adam in his place, his place.

We were created for a place.

We were created to assume a certain place in the grand scheme of things, in reality, in the universe.

His physical environments to begin with.

And so God planted a garden in Eden in the east.

Those are actually three separate thoughts.

There is in the east, and that's east from the perspective of Moses and the writers, probably given on Mount Sinai.

You take a look at the Middle East.

East of Mount Sinai, there's a big desert, and then there's the right hand side for you, the right hand side of the Fertile Crescent, the Tigris, the Euphrates, probably modern day Iran.

Probably, if it was east from where they are, it was probably over there.

We don't know that for sure, and it's quite possible that the flood has changed the topography and so forth.

But in the east, there was a place called Eden.

And within Eden, there was a garden.

It's the garden in Edom.

Edom is larger than just the garden.

But in the east, in Eden, there was a place, a garden.

And the term there is the same term that's used for paradise.

A beautiful, luscious, aesthetically pleasing place, a perfect environment for which mankind was created.

Not the thorns and the thistles and the weeds that we know now.

Verse 9 makes it very clear, and out of the ground the Lord made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The garden was nourishing to the body, delightful to the eye, and satisfying to the soul.

That's what we were made for.

That's what we were destined for.

Not this broken world around us now.

That's a result of sin.

Our first home was beautiful, aesthetically pleasing, satisfying.

It wasn't cold and dark and sharp edges and monolithic.

It wasn't some kind of a prison, something that was distasteful.

No, it was luscious and beautiful, and that is for what we were made.

And there's something inside us that wants all of that.

The kind of place that would be truly heaven on earth.

And I think we could accurately say it was heaven, because as I read the scriptures, heaven is where God is.

And Adam and later Eve, Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden in the cool of the day.

It was a place of fellowship with God.

We were made for that.

A place God breathed into us and then put us in a place of intimate fellowship with Himself.

That's God's design, that's God's intent, that's his intent for you and for me.

Sin has temporarily ravished that, and we look forward to what shall come.

And so when we are anywhere else, we are castaways.

A former professor of mine wrote, Adam and Eve's expulsion made them feel as castaways in a strange land.

That's us now.

This is not where we belong.

In fact, the writer of the book of Hebrews picks up this thought and says, we are pilgrims.

Pilgrims aren't settling down.

This is not a pilgrim's home.

You see, when we lose this reality, then we try to make this our home and we try to find our satisfaction and fulfillment here.

And this is not our home.

We're not meant to be fulfilled in completely fulfilled in this phase of our existence.

Now it doesn't mean we don't want to, if we have the opportunity, make a nice house and comfortable and so forth.

But we're not made.

You are not made for your house.

There is more to life than what we see around us.

This phase of planet dirt is not our home.

So now we are strangers, we're aliens, we're immigrants, we're pilgrims.

We find ourselves someplace that is not really ours, and we are looking for something better.

And that something better will not be brought in by political policies, it will not be brought in by scientific discoveries.

It will only be brought in when God restores our place to that which it was intended to be.

First two chapters of the Bible, last two chapters of the Bible, bookends, paradise, heaven, a garden, the new heavens, the new earth where we are intended to be forever.

We spent weeks talking about this a few months ago when we were looking at life, death, and life after death.

These are the themes of Scripture that we so clearly see.

That's the location.

The vocation is to work and to tend the garden.

Now, when you think of work, it's probably thought of as a necessary evil.

And for many of us that's true.

And so work gets a bad rap in our experience.

Because there are thorns, there are thistles, there are weeds, and it's only through toil and sweat and tears that we are able to eke out our existence.

But that's not the picture of work that is portrayed here.

A couple of significant thoughts here.

Work was given not as a curse, but as a blessing.

There is no curse yet.

This is before the defement and devastation of the created realm that comes as a result of sin.

More important than that is that Adam was placed in the garden with an assignment.

We'll come back to this in the rest of this chapter and in chapter three, but I just want to touch on it here.

There is a vocation which is given to Adam, a calling, a responsibility, an assignment.

And the idea of to keep is to exercise care over, to guard, to protect.

It's really to be a steward, to tend and care for the world around him.

This is at the core of a worldview that for some of us as evangelicals is far from us, where we are to be stewards of the environment.

There is a theology of tending and caring for the created world around it.

We are not just to rip out all of the minerals and cut down all of the trees.

That's not that's the result of sin.

We are to be in harmony with and tend and care for the environment.

This gets into political realms, this gets into philosophical realms.

Frankly, that liberal Christians are much more attuned to than we who know our Bibles because we don't read it very well, perhaps.

So there is an assignment, a mandate, and we'll see more of that coming.

The interesting thing is the normal Hebrew word for work is identical to the normal Hebrew word of to serve.

Fascinating thought.

All kinds of important things to think about here.

But again, this is.

Giving us an orientation to reality that we wouldn't know any other way.

How kind of God to make this known.

One other thing that's central to our understanding of man.

Man is created to have freedom within boundaries.

Look at verse 16 and 17.

And the Lord God commanded man, saying, just stop there for a minute.

God has not spoken to man up until this point.

The very first words that Adam heard from God are the following.

You're free to eat of all of the trees, but of the tree of the knowledge in good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

Now, so much that could be said about this.

But the fact of the matter is that to be human is to have freedom with boundaries in it.

The first word that God spoke to man is of man's limitations.

We get the idea that we ought to be able to do whatever we want to do, and if we get it into our mind, then by golly, we ought to do it because we come up with the idea and I'm not suggesting there's no initiative.

In fact, there should be great and godly stewarding initiative taken, and we'll see that later on.

But we must understand that we're free, but our freedom is of a very specific kind.

It's the freedom of a creature.

Only God has unbounded freedom.

God can do anything he wants.

Theologians argue long and hard, well, can God lie if he wanted to lie?

Those are spurious arguments.

That's not the point here.

The point is that creatures, unlike God, have limitations.

And we must learn to discover and respect and honor the limitations with which we are created.

We'll see the two trees later in chapter three.

The reality of this is that we are not free to determine right and wrong.

What a thought.

Right and wrong is not determined by a 51% vote.

Right and wrong is not determined by the fiat of a dictator.

Right and wrong is not determined by our constitution.

Right and wrong is not determined by what a judge says.

Right and wrong is not what the preacher says.

Right and wrong is what God says is right, and God says is wrong.

Do we know our place?

We live in a generation, in an age, the spirit of an age, that says, do whatever you want to do with whoever you want to do it with.

Mamas and Papas, 1960, something or other.

That's not reality.

And God wants to clue us into reality.

We don't determine.

We don't determine on our own what we can do.

It's as though we can create rights just because we have a document that declares those rights.

And now, in our day, new rights are being discovered every two or three years that are supposedly found in the Constitution.

It's baloney.

The only rights we have are the rights that God gives us.

We are not autonomous to do and be whatever we want to do and be.

Now, here's what I a picture I want you to walk away with.

The freedom that boundaries give.

Within the bounds, there are great freedom.

And the boundaries, they facilitate freedom.

Here's a picture, here's an experience.

We lived in Germany for many years, southwestern Germany, where we had autobonds.

Many, many kilometers on the Autobahn, there's no speed limit, unbounded speed limits.

And very hilly area.

So there were beautifully architecturally designed bridges that went across a huge chasm where down at the bottom of the chasm that was hundred or maybe thousands of feet below where you were, and God, in his sense of humor, gave this non-car guy a really hot car.

It was an Audi A6 that was meant to go and go fast.

And on the Autobahn, you could drive 160 kilometers an hour and you were safe.

The car was built for it, the roads were built for it.

So I would buzz down, I would cover up the speedometer from Jane so that she couldn't really see how fast we were going, and you could go 100 miles an hour across that bridge.

Think for a moment if the guardrails on the bridge were not there.

Do you think that even where fools rush in, that I would rush across a bridge at 100 miles an hour without a clear demarcation of where the boundaries are?

Those guardrails made it safe to have the freedom of speed in that setting.

If those guardrails had not been there, I would have kind of creeped along as close to the center line as possible at about three miles an hour.

And if Jane were in the car without the guardrails, well, she wouldn't have been in the car.

But you see what I'm saying?

The boundaries are not a curse, they're a blessing.

They facilitate great freedom.

When we function within the boundaries of what God has given us, we are free.

Free.

And these are the kinds of things that God is seeking to communicate to us.

All right, I want to close with just a simple story.

We've been talking about our first home.

This points us, as I've indicated, to our final home.

And we saw that in the series a couple of months ago.

I want to read to you an email that I received a few years ago about a friend of mine who went home.

Lois and Harvey were missionary colleagues of ours.

They came from Minnesota, actually.

They had gone to Sweden, served as missionaries there.

They came back to the States about the time we were heading overseas.

He went back into farming in Minnesota, I believe it was.

And then eventually started working in the headquarters office.

And Lois and Harvey and Jane and I knew each other, and we kind of lost touch, but Lois was someone who communicated, and Harvey eventually got sick.

And Harvey died.

And on September 1st, 2010, at 11.08 in the morning, I got an email that said, Harvey is home.

Let me read you what dear sweet Lois said.

In a little book called Gone from My Sight, Death is described as watching a beautiful ship sail into the horizon.

As the ship fades from sight, someone says, There, she's gone.

But in reality, the ship is only gone from our sight.

And just at the moment when someone says, There she is gone, there are other eyes watching the ship coming and voices who take up the glad shout, Here she comes.

I can imagine Carrie, both of our parents and many of our loved ones and relatives saying, Here he comes, as Harvey entered his eternal home.

She goes on and writes, Now Harvey is finally home.

I haven't shared this with all of you, but in the middle of the night of July 31, about a month before he got to go home, Harvey was half awake and talked about what he had just experienced.

He said, Every time I wake up, I'm in a different place.

And it's so beautiful.

I can talk about Jesus with everyone, and it's so easy.

Harvey was an evangelist.

He loved to talk about Jesus with people.

And it was often very hard.

But he could talk about Jesus with everyone, and it was so easy.

The rooms are magnificent, not like here, but absolutely wonderful.

And then he said to me, I want to go there.

Can you take me there, dear Lois?

On Sunday, August 1st, as Harvey and I left home to come to this acute care hospice unit, I tearfully said to Harvey, This might be the last time you see our home.

And Harvey replied, It doesn't matter.

Where I'm going is much better.

Since then he's described that dream that I just told you about and as a bright and beautiful peace where people are content and at peace, no rushing around, the magnificent wood, everything richer than what you would find here on earth, but not overdone.

Good northern plains, let's not exaggerate, all right?

Not overdone.

When I asked him if he had seen Jesus, he said, no, but you could sense his presence.

We're convinced that God gave him a glimpse of what is now his reality.

And so Lois says, He's home.

Praise the Lord.

She said it with tears, of course.

We rejoice that he is personally experiencing the words of a song he loved to hear.

I'm gonna have the time of my life when the time of my life is over.

I'm gonna get carried away when I get carried away.

He must have loved country and western music.

Isn't that great?

I have the time of my life when the time of my life is over.

I'm gonna get carried away when I get carried away.

Harvey is home.

That's what he was created for.

That's what was lost in the garden as a result of sin.

This was not Harvey's home.

This is not our home.

We're going home.