Genesis Two — Genesis 1-2

0:00 Just wanna say that before, before I... When I was... Before the meeting, Josh came over to me and he laid his hand on my shoulder and he prayed for me, and my soul was strengthened. Isn't that nice? Thank you, Josh.

0:14 Appreciate that. We do have the power to strengthen one another, don't we? We have that power. Well, as you may have guessed, my subject is Genesis two. And so last week Ray spoke on Genesis one, told us about the six days of creation.

0:35 Just want to read a little bit out of the last verse of Genesis one. So God had made this wonderful creation and it says, Then God saw everything that He had made and indeed it was very good. So that's the final evaluation of that pristine creation as stood before our God. Well, I'd like to go ahead and start with Genesis two. I'd like to just make a little summary here.

1:08 It starts out verses one through three are the seventh day, so the Sabbath is introduced. Then it jumps back to the third day and it gives us some details about the ecology of the early earth, just very interesting. And and then it jumps back to the sixth day and and the very and the rest of the chapter is all involved in in giving us some additional details about the sixth day. So in the seventh verse, there's some more details about the creation of man, then verses eight through 15, they create the Garden Of Eden called the Garden Of Delights. It's the Garden of God.

1:47 Wonderful place. Where Adam was placed. Then, sixteen and seventeen, the the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is introduced and, just, as a sort of a preface to part of our message is is it's sort of an introduction to the idea of moral responsibility before a holy god. And so so, moral responsibility is introduced there, and then finally 18 through 25, we we get this wonderful moment where god provides this help meet for for Adam. So let's start reading in the beginning of the chapter.

2:28 Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished. And on the seventh day, God ended His work which He had done and rested on the seventh day from all his work, which he had done. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because he rested from all his work, which God had created and made. And so we have two things that are mentioned here about the seventh day. First of all, that God blessed the seventh day and that God sanctified it, set it apart for himself.

3:04 And we know though it doesn't call it the Sabbath here, we know that when we get over into Exodus, it calls it the Sabbath day and looking it up in Vine, we find that the Sabbath day simply means cessation from activity, so rest in other words. And it's interesting that it's called, I believe I found seven times in the Pentateuch that it's called the Sabbath of Rest. Sabbath of Rest, so that's what it's about. Now I also notice that four of those seven times it's called the Sabbath of Solemn Rest, implying something a little bit extra on that, the idea that there's something about this rest that isn't just a recreation, something like that, it's something that would be devoted to God, it's a solemn rest. And indeed, it is actually called the Sabbath of God and the Sabbath of the Lord in the scriptures implying that that time that's set apart for rest is set apart for God.

4:19 And so we have the Sabbath presented. It is kind of interesting that it isn't mentioned from this place that we have it in chapter two, it's not mentioned again until I believe it's chapter 15 of Exodus, it's quite kind of interesting that it isn't mentioned, Might be the seventh day is mentioned in the twelfth chapter of Exodus but it's interesting that for those approximately two thousand four hundred years there's no mention of the Sabbath day. Then suddenly it's introduced and it becomes one of the 10 commandments. The fourth commandment, thou shalt remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Now as you might have expected, the ancient rabbis spliced it and diced it and came up with about 100 different rules about what you had to do on the Sabbath day.

5:17 And it so happened that by the time the Lord Jesus came onto the scene, what are we saying, four thousand years later, about four thousand years later, we find that they're actually using it as a way to try to catch the Lord Jesus up and it says that they even made attempts to kill him because he was healing on the Sabbath day. So it's interesting that our Lord Jesus, he made some clarifications on the Sabbath day and I thought they were interesting. The first one of them was the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. So here they come to Lord Jesus. Why are you healing on the Sabbath day?

6:02 The Lord Jesus must have just simply said, remember that this Lord Jesus that was a man here, He was also the Creator. So when it talks about that God rested on the seventh day, that at least included the Lord Jesus Christ, Then not a man but certainly the Son of God in heaven. And so the Lord Jesus tells them, you know what, as though to say, why don't you just be quiet? He didn't say that but as though to say, why don't you just be quiet? Don't you know the Son of Man is Lord even though the Sabbath?

6:40 Then the second thought that the Lord Jesus brought out, clarification I should say, is He said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. That is the Jewish rabbis had added so many extra rules that it actually had become a burden to man instead of a help to man. Instead of being that time when man would cease from the busyness of life and pause and give his time, give a day of his time to the Lord, it'd become a time where you must not do this, you must not do that. And it actually became a burden to man and the Lord Jesus clarified it. He said, don't you know that the Sabbath was made for man, it wasn't made to be a burden to man.

7:27 And then finally, the Lord Jesus clarified it by saying to them, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. So they were saying, you can't do anything on the Sabbath. The Lord said, no, no, that's not correct. It's lawful to do good on the Sabbath. Now having said all this, then we'll have to ask the question, is Sabbath really a Christian institution?

8:33 Even the one case that it is mentioned in Colossians two sixteen, it's got almost a negative connotation. It says, Let no one judge you in food or in drink or regarding festivals or a new moon or Sabbath, so to say, don't be judged. By the way, if you want a discussion of it, I suggest that you read Romans 14. We're not going to get into the detail, but Romans 14 gives a discussion of those, some who considered one day above another and others that considered every day alike. Just read that and ponder it and you'll get some insights into this idea of the Sabbath.

9:19 So what about the church itself? Well, it appears from the book of Acts that it was actually on the first day of the week that the church met together in Acts 20 verse seven. Now, on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul ready to depart on the next day spoke to them and continued his message until midnight. Now, now, this is an interesting story if you want to read a really interesting story. It's the story of where Eutychus, Paul preached until midnight and Eutychus was sitting back in the window and slowly Eutychus gets a little sleepier and a little sleepier.

9:57 His head nods over and suddenly he loses his balance and he falls right out the window. He falls, I think from the second story, think, falls down on the ground and they run down and there he is unconscious, they thought possibly dead and it's an interesting story. So Paul comes down and he says, oh, he's not dead. And so Eutychus is brought back in health before them. Very interesting story.

10:24 But I'm missing my point. The point is that they met together on the first day of the week to break bread, that was it. And furthermore, history validates that fact that it was the first day of the week, not the Sabbath, that the early church met. Now, you might say something like this. You might say, well, so what's the big deal about the Sabbath then if it isn't for Christianity?

10:47 What's the big deal about it? So say, well, everything in the scriptures is put there for a purpose and so, I I had noted as you go through the Old Testament that you that you find that there's there's a remarkable number of things in the Old Testament that are like pictures or illustrations for us of doctrines in the New Testament, and we understand those doctrines more clearly because of the illustrations. Well, it just so happens that God presents this picture of the Sabbath day as an illustration of a spiritual truth in the New Testament. So I'm going to just read you a couple of verses from Hebrews chapter four. So Hebrews chapter four, says, there remains therefore a rest to the people of God, for he who has entered into his rest has himself also ceased from his own works as God did from his.

11:49 Now if you were if you were to look up a little further in the chapter, you'd see that that part of the the context discussion actually actually quotes this verse from Genesis two. God rested on the seventh day from all his works. So having introduced it like that to us, he says, now there's some way in which a believer today enters into rest that's similar to the way that god entered into his rest and so so it's like, here's a little illustration. So, we start thinking, well, how how does that work now? And so so you you see that god worked for six long days and did a marvelous job of creating a a matchless creation that we live in.

12:41 And then and then on the seventh day, we're saying that god looked at it, said it's very good, and he and he rested. And so now God's saying, you know, there's there's there's some way in which that's similar to what you and I... The situation that you and I have because here we are, and and by by nature, we we want to work and to do something that will some way make us acceptable to our god and and then we find out that really we can't. It's not by works of righteousness that we have done but according to his mercy saved us. We find out that it's not our works that has to do with it at all.

14:05 So it certainly has a place in the Christian doctrine. Well, let's go on to the next three verses in our chapter in Genesis two. It says, This is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth and there was no man to till the ground, but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the earth. So I've tried to pull, I pulled a little picture off the internet that might give you, give a sense of what this mist may have been like. I suppose the mist came up and then through through some physical phenomena, it matter of fact, we actually see it see it occasionally, I think.

15:03 The, it's very foggy and everything is covered with heavy dew and it must have been something like that and only it was the regular normative of the ecology of the environment was that this mist would come up. Now, I had mentioned that this was in the third day and because it makes this statement in the fifth verse that it was before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown yet we find out that the ground is there. So if you were to look back through the detail of Genesis chapter one, you'd find out in the third day that God made the dry land appear. So God takes the floor of the ocean so this beacon thrusts it up and the water runs off and the dry land appears. And then we're told that there was something about the ecology so that it didn't rain.

16:06 Didn't rain like we have it today. Instead, this mist went up and watered the earth. Now it's interesting that you actually don't even hear about rain until the time of the flood. That wouldn't absolutely mean that it didn't rain, but it might indicate that. As matter of fact, there was one point that I thought was kind of interesting.

16:30 It tells us the story of the flood that after the flood, Noah and his family offered up sacrifices to God and that God was pleased and that God put the rainbow, the bow into the clouds that it was a sign, and that sign was that God would never again destroy the world with a flood. A promise was made, and a sign was given. Well, it I just wondered how much of a sign it would have been if having a rainbow in the sky was normative. If if if, like, at least six or eight times a year, it rained and you went out and then looked up in the sky and, woah, there's the beautiful rainbow, then how much of a sign would it have been? So I think that was, that at least is an indication that no, it really, this type of an ecology actually existed in the pre flood time.

17:27 I don't know there's any great doctrine associated with that, but I just think it's interesting. Okay, now I want us to go on to the next verse, and now we're going to jump from the third day back into the sixth day, and we're going to get a little bit more detail about the man, the creation of man. Seventh verse, And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. And so we try to somehow think, well, how was this? How did this happen?

18:56 And suddenly, it's kind of stirring around and suddenly, an arm comes out and suddenly, suddenly Adam rises up and he, you see him, he gives this curious look here and there as though he's trying to figure out what's going on. It's really kind of an awesome little clip. And I thought, hey, maybe it was a little bit like that. And I thought, you know, in our current culture, through science we've learned an amazing amount of detail about man and about, say, the molecular structure of man and the DNA. I'm no expert at it, but I am awed by it.

19:44 But just think for a minute that at that moment, now this is the Creator God that we have, So at that moment, when when this man is suddenly standing there and and and he's been created, do do we understand what that means? That that man who's who stood there was composed of approximately 3,000,000,000,000 cells, every every one of which had the same DNA signature within it. And and and there he stood. He had all his systems working properly, his skeletal system, his muscular system, his digestive system, his nervous system, his cardiovascular system, all those systems were working perfectly. What?

20:34 You mean he was mud and now he is this? And the answer is that's the kind of God we have. That is the kind of God that we have. And if we look on creation, let's look at it as the marvelous thing that it is. Was couldn't we truly say made in astounding, marvelous complexity?

20:56 That's what our God did. Now I want to just, as a matter of review, just go to one verse out of Genesis one, just verse 26. And it speaks about man being made in the image understand that likeness means similarity. So there are certain similarities between us and God. But I want to point to this word image and just say that there's a little bit more involved in the word image than just likeness.

21:30 It is likeness, but it's more than just likeness. And I'm going to illustrate it this way. So going away from this subject for a minute, we'll go on a little bit further in the history of man and we find that they began to do idol worship and we find that the various ones who had their gods, which were actually, we were told in scriptures, are actually evil spirits, but they made idols which represented that god. It was an image. And supposedly whatever that image was like would give some suggestion of what their god was like.

22:09 Some of them were pretty hideous. And so we get an idea of that, this idea of representation. And now we're told this about man, that man was made in the image of God, that is man bears the responsibility to represent God in this world. That's a sort of a moral responsibility that man has to represent God in this world. So he was created by God.

22:39 He's put here as something that would represent God. Now we know that the Lord Jesus Christ was the only one that perfectly represented our God. And I've enjoyed that verse in John chapter one that says he declared God. It says, No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten son who's in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.

23:01 The Lord Jesus Christ was the perfect image of God. But that doesn't remove our responsibility to live our lives in such a way that God is represented in a wicked world. And so I believe that's part of the moral responsibility that man bears as being created by God. Now, it's the the verse that we have says, man became a living being. I know in in the old King James, it says, man became a living soul and I like that.

23:34 I like that a a little bit better because I remember some years ago I was interested in this idea of body, soul, and spirit. And so I did my personal search. I got a Strong's Concordance and I went and there were literally hundreds of references. And I looked up each one of them and read it and tried to get a sense of what it was saying, took took some notes, and and I I came up with this with this conclusion that that there's something about this word soul that seems to be reasonably consistent to be looking at man as being a morally responsible agent before God. So yes, he's a living being, but he's more than that, he's a living being who is responsible to the God who made him.

24:22 It was kind of interesting. Now, to me, I think perhaps the best verse to actually get the point of the living soul is Ezekiel eighteen:four where God Himself says this, Behold, all souls are mine. The soul of the Father as well as the soul of the Son is mine, God speaking. The soul who sins shall die. Moral responsibility before God.

24:51 Let's remember that. We're going to get into that a little bit more when we get to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Okay, so let's jump on into the subject of the Garden of Eden. So going to the eighth verse, and God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

25:55 No wonder it's called Garden Of Eden. It means Garden of Delights. Would you like to have been there? I think I would have liked to have been there. Garden Of Eden.

26:05 And then it further describes the rivers. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from that it parted and became four riverheads. The name of the first is Pishon. It is one which skirts the whole land of Havilah where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. Dillion and the onyx stone are there.

26:30 The name of the second river is Gihon. It is the one which goes around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Hideakal. And it's footnoted in my Bible as Tigris and there's good basis for that footnote. It is the one which goes to the East of Assyria and the fourth is the Euphrates.

26:55 Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden Of Eden to tend and to keep it. So I thought the Rivers Of Eden were kind of interesting. I pulled up a map off the internet and added some names to it And we can see that it has the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. This would be modern day Iraq. I believe Babylon is somewhere down here.

27:21 Or Baghdad rather is down here. And and if you'll note the two rivers, you can see that these two rivers come together up in in the mountainous area of Turkey. They don't actually touch up there but they they have their their roots. There must be kind of a continental divide there that wouldn't be actually continental, but that sort of a divide up there, which if you're on this side of it, you go down the Tigris and the other side, you go down the Euphrates. Now, this is very fascinating.

27:58 Wouldn't you think that you should be able to just go up there somewhere near the top of the Tigris and Euphrates and look around a little bit and there's the Garden Of Eden, look. And so so in our imagination, wouldn't that be neat? Not true. Many people have tried it. You go out, there's no evidence of a Garden Of Eden up there, and I and I ask about that because another thing that's strange about it is you don't see other two rivers at all, at least nothing that seems to compare to them.

28:27 I said, so how would I explain that? Well, I believe that the answer is that the flood made such a tremendous change in the actual topography of the land and after the flood there was tremendous up pressures that pushed the mountains, the taller mountains up and so that the whole type topography of the land changed and and no doubt the flood itself washed away the last the last remnants of the Garden Of Eden. And so nobody can identify that garden anymore. But anyway, it's quite interesting. So the Lord God took man and he put him in the Garden Of Eden to tend and keep it.

29:14 It was Garden Of Delights. Now we'll go to the sixteenth verse and we'll get this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the guard... Of every... I'm sorry.

29:36 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. Wow, so there's something about this tree. It was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We have no idea what this tree was like. All we know is that there was a tree in the garden and it was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

30:06 Furthermore, there was nothing, strictly speaking, about the tree itself that was immoral, So the problem with eating this tree was simply, was really reduced very simply to a matter of obedience to a Creator God. So the God that created them and put them in the garden said, don't eat of that tree in the day that you eat of it, you'll surely die. Very awesome. We might even ask the question, so why did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden? Why did God do that?

31:21 It says consider the moral character in which Adam and Eve were created. Now if we can get a handle on this idea of moral responsibility, I think it will help us in all of life. Well, first of all, the first principle is this, man was created by god as a moral being responsible to obey his creator. So, that's the number one principle of all script of scripture. Now, it should be clear enough to us that even before the fall, man had a will of his own which required submission.

31:57 I thought it was even interesting to ponder that even the Lord Jesus, the spotless, impeccable Son of God was heard to say this, nevertheless not my will, but yours be done. So the Lord Jesus had a will, but he perfectly and perfectly yielded that will to his Father. So it's not that there's something wrong with having a will. Hopefully, we would submit that will to God and would do the will of God but we have to understand that part of the whole idea of creation itself is there is a God there and we're responsible to him. The second point, man was given at least one initial commandment, a standard for moral responsibility by which obedience could be evaluated.

32:53 And so he was told very clearly in our verse that we just read that there's a tree in this garden called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and you're not to eat of that tree, don't eat of that tree. And if you eat of it, there'll be, you'll have a problem, you'll surely die. And so there was a standard by which it could be said, see, you shouldn't have done this and you did it. So that's the second principle. The third principle is that man was allowed choice to obey or not to obey because choice is indeed a component of moral responsibility.

33:36 So when we get this idea in mind that God tells man what to do, he puts it before man and then man has to respond. Will he choose to do what God tells him to do or will he not choose? So choice is definitely a part of the whole principle of moral responsibility before God. The next principle is testing and so I'm not going to try to steal Art's story from him, but we know that Adam and Eve were tested by the serpent, So man was allowed to be tempted because testing is a component of moral responsibility which reveals our true moral character. So God allows things in our lives that would test us to see what what are we like, and and I I would say my my personal opinion would be that god himself knows pretty much what we're like, but I would guess that that testing was there more to show us what we're like and which one of us hasn't fallen under testing.

34:45 Okay, so pain and suffering in our lives today are all part of this testing of mankind. So how could man be able to stand in this test that God puts? How would man be able to stand in this test? Well, it's man's faith in God that is the means by which he could remain obedient to his creator in the face of temptation. And so we can see that in his relationship with god in in the garden, that it's kind of interesting to ponder it because they had actual conversations with god.

35:29 There there was actual actual conversations with god and and there was no doubt a sense that God was the creator and he's the one that had the say and so when finally the time came, the testing time came, the question is would you believe the tempter or would you believe God? Which will you believe? And so it became a real test of faith. Do you believe God? Do you really believe God?

36:00 And faith is what could have kept man. Man was held accountable for his choices because accountability is a component of moral responsibility. So, we're at this point where we can point ahead and say there's some time, some time that I'm going to stand in the presence of my God and I'm going to give an answer for how I live my life here. So accountability is definitely a part of this idea of moral responsibility before God. There is a day of accountability.

36:46 Man was warned of consequences of disobedience because consequences are a component of moral responsibility. Since man was created to live forever, the consequences of his choices are everlasting. Also interesting observation. Now in this paradigm of moral responsibility, you have these two things. You have first choices and then you have consequences.

37:16 Choices, consequences. Choices, consequences. And so they're kind of paired together and that's all part of what our responsibility before God is to make the proper choices. Now the final point, observation that I had from Genesis one through three is this, that man found himself participating in a great moral struggle involving forces and influences outside of himself and much greater than himself. We might say it like this: there is a larger picture.

38:29 Do we really have faith in our God? So anyway, I think that's a pretty good rundown of the idea of moral responsibility in Genesis one through three. Now we get the pleasurable part, the last few verses that talk about when Adam is given this wonderful new bride, beautiful Eve. And so, I'll just read the the next three verses to us. I'm going to read them out of my Bible.

38:59 You can read them up there if you wish. Okay. So, so starting with verse 18, and the Lord God said, it's not good for man that man should be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him. So out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to Adam to see what He would call them.

39:24 And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the air and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper comparable to him. So I pulled another image off of the Internet. I thought it was kind of cute.

39:49 Here's Adam and he's in the garden and now Eve is not here, is she? And I think this picture might have been a little better if it had shown a male and a female lion and a male and a female elephant and so forth. Seen them in couples coming up to them, but it didn't. So so in a way in a way, God makes us so we ask the question, what's wrong with this picture? Well, of course, the answer is, where's Eve?

40:18 Where where's comparable the the helper comparable to Adam? So Lord said it's not good for man to be alone. So now before God is going to make this help me for Eve, God, first of all, he takes Adam and he he brings each of these animals to Adam and I'm going to propose that he brings male and female because it serves my purposes. So so so Adam's there and God brings the... Say brings a male and a female lion and Adam reaches his hand over and lays it on a lion's mane and he says, you're a lion.

41:03 And then goes a little bit further and a horse, a male and a female horse and does Adam start picking up this male female business and he says, wait a minute, wait a minute, what about me? So I'm thinking that actually that probably, there was probably an element of that in it. But anyway, God carefully brings all these different animals. We can see maybe in our imagination, gigantic elephant coming up and Adam's eyes getting bigger and bigger. He says, woah, look at that nose.

41:43 And then he says, you're an elephant, you know, whatever, you know. We we that's purely our imagination of exactly how it would be, but but we have to understand that scripture says that it really did happen. Okay, so so after God has spent whatever time it took to to give give a pretty good cross section of of of this a conclusion is drawn. But for Adam, there was not found a helper comparable to him. Nowhere in all nature could be found this helper comparable.

42:20 Now it's God's time to work. And so we go to the twenty first verse. And God caused God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and he slept. And he, God, took one of Adam's ribs and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, he made into woman and he brought her to the man.

42:44 I always like to, in my imagination, to think about this. So Adam's in this deep sleep, you know, wakes up from the sleep and something's itching, he kind of scratches. What's this? There's a little indentation there where a rib's gone, you know. So he says, woah.

42:59 Yeah. God did tell me he was gonna do that. And then he looks around and says, woah. What's this? In my imagination, in the cartoons where it shows all these little hearts that are going up above someone.

43:14 That's the way it was. I'm sure that's the way it was. So, instant love. And so, Adam blinks his eyes a couple of times and he comes out with this expostulation. Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

44:09 Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh, the institution of marriage. And so I get the sense here when it says a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife that at this point of marriage, and we've had several of them the last couple of years, haven't we? At this point of marriage, a man finally finds that wonderful, special woman that's his helpmate, to be his helpmate. And so he takes her and she becomes his bride and now he's no longer to stay in his parents' house. He's to go out and he and his wife form a new unit in society, an actual new unit in society.

45:03 I believe that it would be a safe thing to say that the basic unit of society is the family. And so a new unit is formed and they, no matter what their parents did that was either good or bad, no matter what they did, the responsibility doesn't pass to the parents anymore, it passes to them. They are now to be the parents. They are now to be the ones that have their focus on God and they're gonna build a little family unit where God is honored and that's the teaching of scripture. And in particular, it makes the statement that this unit that it says they shall become one flesh.

45:48 They're together. No doubt the greatest exhibition of that is when they have children together. And so, what I'd like to do here is go to where the Lord Jesus quotes this in Matthew Chapter 19 and just read it. I'm going to go to Chapter 19 because I decided I would actually read just a little bit more than what we actually have here. So Chapter nineteen:three, The Pharisees also came to Him, Jesus, testing Him and saying to Him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?

46:34 And he answered and said to them, have you not read that he who made them at the beginning made them male and female? So that would be from Chapter one. And said, and this is our verse, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So then they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let not man separate.

47:07 Well, they continued to argue with him. They said to him, Why then did Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and to put her away? And so he explains this to him. He says to them, Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you that whoever divorces his wife except for sexual immorality and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries her that is divorced commits adultery.

47:40 So that's the teaching that our Lord Jesus Christ himself gave to us on the subject of marriage. Now I was pondering this as I was preparing, I was pondering this and I realized that some questions could be raised like for instance a person might come and say well what about me? I'm already divorced and you're irreparably divorced. So, well, first statement can be, well, the Lord Jesus Himself leaves an exception. If it's sexual immorality, it's permissible to divorce, but then supposing the person that came up to me and said that, supposing that person said to me, you don't understand, I'm the one that did the sexual immorality that caused the divorce.

49:14 So God help us in this to understand His principles, to follow them, and to rejoice in Him, to acknowledge that He is indeed our Creator God who has the right to tell us what we ought to do. Let's bow in prayer. Father God, we just are amazed at the richness of this chapter and the truths that we can draw from it. We just praise you that you've given us your word, which is a light to our path and a direction for us, Lord. And so we do ask you for your help for us as an assembly of Christians to honor you and to bless you.

50:00 And we pray this in Jesus' name, Amen. Let me just