A brief overview for Sunday School teachers and Bible study leaders, of Lifeway’s “Explore the Bible” lesson of Genesis 2:7-9, 15-25 for Sunday, December 10, 2023, “The First Couple.” A video overview of this overview is available on YouTube at:

INTRO ??? Anyone want to share a fun story of how you met your husband/wife??? Or of someone you know who has an interesting story.

(For EX: I’ve shared before with our group, that Cheryl & I grew up in the same high school. Actually the first time I was ever aware of Cheryl was in 7th grade, in art class, when she was being hauled out into the hallway to be paddled for cutting up in class!) 

I know your group will have some interesting things to share. After you’ve finished those stories, then you can say something like: Today we are going to look at how God brought the very FIRST couple together in the Garden of Eden! 

CONTEXT 

Last week we looked at God’s creation of everything, “creationism” vs. “naturalism,” the two primary ways to view the world. Chapter 2 now goes into more detail on God’s creation of man, and with some specifics of what He commanded the man to be and do:

OUTLINE

I. God Creates Man and the Garden (2:7-9)

II. God Commissions Man in the Garden (:15-17)

III.  God Consecrates the First Couple (:18-15)

I. God Creates Man and the Garden (:7-9)

NOTICE all the action here:

— :7 “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

— :8 “The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.”

— :9 “Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

??? WHO was doing all the action here???
GOD!  Over and over we see: “the LORD God” did this and that.

Let me re-emphasize: when you see “LORD” in all 4 caps in the Old Testament, that means that in Hebrew this is not the typical Hebrew for “Lord,” (Adonai) but rather the personal name of God, “YHWH”, Yahweh, or Jehovah. This is the name that God would later give Moses when he asked Him what he should tell Israel His name was. “God” here is the typical Hebrew word for God, “Elohim.” 

So repeatedly here you have “Yahweh Elohim (did this) … Yahweh Elohim (did that) …” and so on. 

It is saying THIS PARTICULAR GOD did this; not just “any” god; not Baal or Asherah, or Molech, or any other god; YAHWEH God, “Yahweh Elohim” did all this! The God of Israel; the God who would reveal Himself as Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. THIS God performed all the action of creation that we see here in Genesis 1 & 2. 

NOTICE a couple of other things of significance we see in the text here:

— :7 says “YHWH Elohim formed man of dust from the ground.” 

??? Why do you think God did that; what was the significance of it???
(Man had a very humble origin. He was DUST — UNTIL God breathed into him the breath of life. It tells us that we are nothing without God; it reminds us of how much we need Him!)

— Then the word “man” here is interesting: it is the Hebrew word “adam”, which is the same word for the name of the man, “Adam.” Often when you see the word “man” in the Old Testament, it is the Hebrew word “Adam.” In fact, when you see the words “the man” in Genesis 2, it is almost always “ha adam,” “the man.” (AND “adam”, or “man” is very close to the Hebrew word for “ground,” “adamah” — just reminding us of where we came from!

— :9 talks about the trees that God planted in the Garden. There are two purposes for them that we see in the first part of the verse:

— “that is pleasing to the sight”

— “and good for food”

So according to this verse, God had at least two purposes for trees:

— one was to produce food 

??? Who has a favorite food from a tree???
(I love cherries!)

— another, perhaps surprisingly, was to be “pleasing to the sight.” God wanted trees to be aesthetically pleasing — that is, to be “nice to look at.” 

I think this tells us something important about God, and about our world, that we might be tempted to overlook: GOD CARES ABOUT HOW THINGS LOOK! He wants trees to be “pleasing to the sight.” He provided things for us to be pleasant in our surrounding.

THIS HAS A LOT OF APPLICATION: for landscaping, for decorating in general. God wants things to be “pleasing to the sight” for us!  That is not just a “frivolous waste” to Him. Having things that are “pleasing to the sight” are a good part of God’s creation. (Perhaps some of us should take more time with it, and appreciate that, more than we do! And others of us can stop feeling “guilty” about making things look nice, and know that there is a Biblical basis for it!

— Then in the second part of :9, the Bible tells us two SPECIFIC trees God put in the Garden: 

— “the tree of life”

— “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”

These two are significant, and will come to play in a major in the next verses.

II. God Commissions Man in the Garden  (:15-17)

:15 “Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.” 

??? What does :15 say God put man in the Garden to do???

(“Cultivate it and keep it”

The word “cultivate” is a primary word in Hebrew, “abad,” that just means “to work/serve”

The word “keep” (Hebrew “shamar”) means “keep/watch/preserve” — the same word “Shema” is used in Deut. 6, where we are to “keep” God’s word!

But an interesting point here is, that it was God’s ORIGINAL PURPOSE for the man to “work/serve/keep” the Garden!  God put man there to work!

I say this because sometimes we get the idea that “work” was a “punishment” that came after the fall of man into sin in Chapter 3. And :17-19 do seem to indicate that it is going to be HARDER for man to work the ground now, after sin. BUT we see here, WORK ITSELF IS NOT A PUNISHMENT! Fruitful work is part of what God put Man in the Garden to do from the very beginning; even before his fall into sin!

Some of us need this Biblical perspective: work itself is not a “punishment.” An unpleasant job can “feel” like a punishment, but work itself should NOT be. 

??? Anyone want to share a particular kind of work that you get great satisfaction and joy from doing???

(I certainly do from preaching and teaching, and doing these lessons!

I would be surprised if you don’t have several people in your group share about kinds of work they find fulfilling.

Then = This is what God intended work to be for us. It is not a “punishment.” It is part of the purpose for which He put us here in the first place. 

Then in :16-17 “The LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘From any tree in the garden you may eat freely; (:17) BUT from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die.”

Some people ask: Why would God deny mankind that one tree? For one, the better question is, Why aren’t we grateful for all the other trees that He DID give us? (This is the way it is with a lot of things, too, by the way. Sometimes we ask: why don’t I have “x” — when the real question is, why aren’t you grateful for all the “a through w” that GOd HAS given you?! 

But why did God put that tree there, that we couldn’t have? 

HE GAVE US A CHOICE. Would we really love and obey Him? The only way to really know, is to have a choice. 

My old seminary professor, Dr. David Garland said that “virtue untried is merely the result of circumstance.” In other words, we had to be tested to see if we would really love and obey God. We’re not obedient to God if we don’t have a real CHOICE. So He had to give us something to choose about. (I remember though, Dr. Garland saying, you can see whose side He was on, in that He gave us the least number of temptations He could in our test: just ONE! There was only ONE tree, one fruit we couldn’t have. And of course we failed even that, as we will see in Chapter 3 …)

But God gave us a choice, right here in the very beginning. Sadly we know what we did with that choice, as we will see later … 

III. God Ordains the First Couple (:18-25)

This is one of THE best passages on marriage in the whole Bible. In fact, you COULD choose to do your whole study just on these verses, if the Lord leads you to.  This is the passage I do most of my wedding ceremony sermons from. We find several principles regarding marriage here.

(You can either just lecture on these points, or what I plan to do is to print out these verses on an oversized page — or you could print them out on a poster, just distribute photocopied a Bible page with this text. And then I plan to ask my group to survey this passage and call out:

??? “What all principles regarding marriage do you see here”???

(Now the reason I do this, instead of just lecture on it, is that it gives the group an exercise in finding truths from God’s word themselves. I think this  is good training for disciples.)

But whichever way you are led to do it, I would highlight and comment on the following principles:

— :18 “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”

This tells us that marriage is GOD-ORDAINED. This is God’s idea. Marriage is not just a “tradition” of men, that people dreamed up. It is GOD’S plan, from the very beginning. 

Thus when people go about questioning the reason or purpose for marriage, or seek to change the nature of it, they aren’t just seeking to change an institution of MAN, but something that GOD ordained. 

We can be confident that marriage is God’s plan.

That reminds me of a funny story from a seminary friend of mine. At the time he was a single music minister candidate interviewing at a church, and he was being interviewed by the search committee. One of the members seemed to be a bit skeptical about him being a single man, and he asked him: “Do you believe in God’s plan for marriage?” My friend said, “Oh yes, sir; I do believe in it. I’m just hoping to get in on it!”  

You can share that story if you’d like to, but the point I’d emphasize out of :18 here is that marriage is something that GOD ordained from the very beginning. It is HIS plan. We see this reinforced in the New Testament, in places like:

— Matthew 19, where the Pharisees were asking Jesus about marriage and divorce, and He said, (:4) “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, (:5) and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?”  We’re going to get to some of those other truths in a minute, but the main point here is that Jesus went back to Genesis 2 when He was asked about marriage. This is where we find GOD’S PLAN for marriage begun.

— Ephesians 5 does the same thing. Talking about New Testament marriage principles, again Paul goes back to Genesis 2, saying in :31, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Again, marriage principles always look back to GOD’S ORIGINAL PLAN in Genesis 2! 

This is God’s plan, and we need to follow it, and make sure we don’t try to alter it. And it’s not something that MAN just “invented;” it’s GOD’S plan!

— :22 “God fashioned into a WOMAN the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.” 

(Now, make sure you do NOT share that God taking Adam’s rib is why men have one less rib than women; this is a myth and is not true. Men and women have the same number of ribs! God taking the rib didn’t change Adam’s DNA that he passed on to all other men!) 

But the important point here is: Not only is marriage God’s plan, but His plan is for a WOMAN and a MAN to be united in marriage. 

This goes back to what we saw in Creation in Chapter 1:27, “Male and female He created them.” God designed us as male and female, and for us to reject our gender is to reject God’s design for us. And here we see that when God established marriage, He designed it for a relationship between a MAN and a WOMAN. 

This idea is being challenged today, by those who would teach that two women, or two men, or two “non-binary” people can be united in marriage. And this is becoming more and more acceptable in our society today. But the principles of God’s word do not change with the changing winds of popular opinion. God’s word teaches that marriage is for one man and one woman. 

This is one of the clearest teachings in the word of God:

— We see it here in Genesis 1 & 2

— We see it again Leviticus 18:22 “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” I have heard many people criticize that as “only the Law,” “only the Old Testament” — but it is repeated numerous times also in the New Testament:

— Romans 1:27 talks about “men with men committing indecent acts”

— I Corinthians 6:9 “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” And it lists “homosexuals” among the unrighteous.

— I Timothy 1:10 talks about “the ungodly and sinners” and it lists those sinners, including “immoral men and homosexuals”

So there is no question what the Bible teaches about this. This is why I believe that the Christian’s/church’s stance on homosexual practice is one of THE watershed issues today. The Bible is SO clear on what it teaches about this; and it is SO foundational and fundamental, starting from Genesis to the New Testament, that if you reject this, there is NOTHING in scripture you can believe. You may as well throw the entire book out. (Which is basically what many have done!) 

But the Bible is very clear as to God’s plan: it is for one MAN and one WOMAN to come together in marriage.

— :23 “this is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh”

This symbolizes the CLOSENESS of the relationship between the man and the woman. She literally came from him. They were close, intimate. (As we will see in :24, no one is to be closer) 

People often talk about their marriage partner as being their “best friend,” and I think that is ideal; that is what this is talking about. 

They tell us that Charles Wesley was very vivacious and outgoing, with a winsome personality. “He valued friendship so much that he often called his wife, Sally, “my dearest friend”; this was not to demean matrimony, but rather to show what an elevated understanding of friendship he had.”

(John R. Tyson, Asssist Me To Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley, loc. 1513)

John Newton was the former slave trader who was saved and wrote “Amazing Grace.” In his later life he had an amazing ministry of counseling people through writing letters. In one of his letters he wrote: 

“I think to a feeling mind there is no temporal pleasure equal to the pleasure of friendship; and no friendship to be compared with that between man and wife, when their union is sanctified by grace and the Lord’s blessing.”(to Miss Flower, Letters of John Newton, Josiah Bull, ed., p. 331)

Again, the point is, marriage is to be our closest friendship, our closest relationship. “Bone of our bone; flesh of our flesh.” It was literally so for Adam, but should be spiritually so for all who are married as well.

— :24 “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife”. THE PRINCIPLE OF “LEAVING” or PRIORITY

Here is another important principle: there needs to be a “leaving” in a sense. Most often, this involves a physical “leaving.” Perhaps sometimes a husband and wife will live with their family if circumstances require, but it’s not best. They need to “leave” and set up a family of their own.

When Cheryl & I were married, we immediately moved from Oklahoma to Ft. Worth Texas, where I was attending seminary. Later, Cheryl said that this physical distance was helpful to our marriage. There, hours away from home, she couldn’t “run home to mama” or even call her very often in those days of “long distance” phone calls. We had to work things out on our own. That moving far away was one of the great blessings of our marriage. 

Even when the physical distance is not that great, there needs to be a purposeful making the PRIORITY of your partner in your new marriage. You will always love your parents. But when you get married, your mom or dad, your old “nuclear family,” is no longer the most important relationship in your life any more. Now your husband or wife is the most important. You “leave your father and mother,” priority-wise, and cleave to your husband or wife. THEY are now the new #1 in your life. And you need to make sure that they, and everyone else, knows that. 

— :24 “be joined to his wife” The old King James says “cleave.” The Hebrew word means to “cling to, hold to, ADHERE to” — I’ve heard the analogy of “super glue” used to describe this word. You stick to them like super glue, in a bond that cannot be broken. 

This word was used of Ruth, who was committed not to leave her mother-in-law Naomi, even after her husband died. When everyone else deserted Naomi, Ruth did not. She “stayed with her.” That is what this word means. 

This shows us that marriage is to be a PERMANENT relationship.

Marriage is not something we should go into thinking, “Well, I’ll do this for a while, until I get tired of it, then move on.” 

For example, a few years ago I saw a survey that asked newly married young married people, How long do you think your marriage will last? The average response as “about 7 years”! These people are going into marriage thinking it will only last a few years. With that kind of attitude, there is a very good chance it will fail!

This is NOT what the Bible teaches here. It says we are to go in fully committed to a relationship that is to last a lifetime. 

Now, do we sometimes fall short of that ideal? Yes, Jesus said in Matthew 19 “because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you divorce … but from the beginning it has not been this way.” In other words, do we fall short of the standard? YES. There is a lot of sin in the world. But the original principle has not changed: marriage is to be a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman.  That is God’s plan.

— :25 ??? What do you think is meant by this: “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed”?

I don’t think it only refers to the physical state, but that it symbolizes the openness and purity of that original relationship. They had nothing to hide. They were totally open to each other.  And of course that is how our marriages should be today as well.

So to wrap up this segment, you could do a couple of things:

You could ask your group:  ??? Which of these principles is the most significant, or the most challenging, to you???

OR: A WAY TO CONCLUDE the lesson might be to share this quote:

(Or you could use it as an introduction, or somewhere else)

“(Just after Calvin Coolidge’s marriage to his wife Grace) Grace saw that their life would be work but easier because they were a team. She imagined horses in a double harness. Coolidge appreciated her energy; Grace was more like his grandmother Aunt Mede than his melancholy mother. He saw that Grace might be the one to pull him along.”

(Amity Shlaes, Coolidge, p. 90)

And ask your group: ??? “What do you think of this picture of marriage as being like horses in a double harness?”???

(Discuss that as your group is led — but you might point out that the Apostle Paul uses a very similar illustration when he writes in II Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be bound together (lit., “unequally YOKED”) with unbelievers.”)

ANOTHER MARRIAGE STORY: you can use as an intro to the lesson, for a conclusion, or anywhere along the way as you are led:

“As a justice of the peace, (Judge Roy Bean) could marry people. … He sometimes merged his rituals for marrying and burying. He would use his official pronouncement of death as the last thing he said at a wedding: ‘I pronounce you man and wife. May God have mercy on your souls.’’

(W.F. Strong, Stories From Texas, p. 49)

Marriage is certainly not as bad as Judge Roy Bean made it out to be — it can be one of God’s greatest blessings — IF we will do it His way, as Genesis 2 shows us here!

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