The Creation of Man
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 28 October 2018
Evolution is not a reasonable explanation for the universe or life on earth in any sense whatsoever. It is scientifically impossible and it is biblically rejected. Anyone who rejects that God created the universe in six, 24-hours days makes an assault on the historicity of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture and the authenticity of Scripture.
The Bible itself stands or falls with the historical accuracy of Genesis 1. If we cannot trust the creation account, then why should we trust anything else on the pages of Scripture? Tragically, one of the most severe blows ever dealt to the Christian faith has been inflicted by so-called Christians and so-called evangelical scholars who reject widely the Genesis account, in favor of some form of evolution.
Andy Macintosh who wrote, ‘Genesis for Today’ says, "In recent years, a somewhat strange trend has developed in Christian circles. Some evangelical Christians have been developing the concept that God used evolution to make the world, which is termed theistic evolution. Such an idea is not new but it now becoming fashionable among evangelicals, as well as to liberals.
Another book which rejects creation is called, The Scandal of Evangelical Mind, written by Mark Knoll. "The Christian evangelical is increasingly being led to believe that the literal interpretation of Genesis is simply a matter of opinion and this is brought out by the book, Creation and Evolution. He says, "The issue of creation is a secondary issue like things such as passivism or politics where Christians have every right to disagree."
Is the Bible so unclear as to creation that it's a point where we can disagree? Well, many evangelicals believe so. In fact, the majority seem to think so and the irony is that while more and more evangelicals are embracing a form of evolution, while secular writers are beginning to rethink whether evolution could have happened at all. Unbelief in Genesis could ultimately destroy their confidence in the other 65 books.
The whole meaning of sin and redemption is blurred and lost if we lose the anchor of Genesis. If we are to believe we originally came from apes, with generations of violence and bloodshed and that there was no literal Eden, what do we make of the Bible's promises concerning the new Heavens and the new earth in which righteousness dwells? Even the well-known Bible commentator, John Stock, believes that man evolved.
Now, this is a grievous and a terrible distrust of Scripture in its first chapter and it ultimately undermines all biblical authority and brings the right to question everything that comes after Genesis 1. So as we have been learning from Genesis, it is clear that this is the true Word of God regarding creation history and we have treated it as such to the honor of God and so our own understanding is clear.
The high point of creation came on day six in Genesis 1:26, God made man. "Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, let them rule over the fish in the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And God created man in His own image and the image of God, He created a male and female.”
He created them and God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.' And God said, 'I've given you every plant-yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth and every tree which has fruit-yielding seed. It shall be food for you.'"
Man was made in God's image. This means that he had self-consciousness, personality, cognition--that is, the ability to rationally process information, he had intelligence, and he had creativity. And it is staggering to look around the world and see the immense creativity of man. The architecture that man created is breathtaking. The design is just amazing and then in a museum you can see painting after painting by all the masters.
There are marks of creativity in man that reflect the image of God in him and then there is the relationships we talked about. Only man builds relationships. Now with the creation of man on day six, the real story began. All the rest of creation was only a stage for man to play out the drama of redemption. All the other creation just provided the backdrop for the history of man.
Now, the history of man starts in Genesis 2:4 and goes to the end of Genesis 50:26. It is not a second account of creation, as critics have said. Genesis 2 does not deal with anything during the week of creation, except what pertains to the story of man. That's very important. Genesis 2 describes all the details under that headline of Genesis 1. Genesis 2 only deals with man with the rest of creation as the backdrop.
Now how did Moses obtain this information? He didn't get it from any human source, for no one existed to witness it. God revealed the data to him. Listen to Hebrews 11:3, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” The only way we have any record of creation is if the Creator gave it to us.
Genesis 2:4-6, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.”
How can we understand that there was no shrub of the field, no plant of the field because there was no rain when on the third day, God created plants and He created trees and it didn't rain? The flood, in Noah's time in Genesis 6, came about 1,000 years later. So how can we say, if we're talking about man, that God hadn't created the plants yet and that the reason He hadn't created them was there wasn't any rain?
Confusion comes from a superficial understanding of the Hebrew text. Kiseido, the great Hebrew scholar, says that "The first way that a Hebrew deals with history is to state the general proposition and then to clarify the details and the particulars." That's how Genesis 2 relates to Genesis 1. He affirms that Genesis 2 just adds detail to the original statement in Genesis 1 to further clarify the place of man as the central being in the universe.
What verse 5 is not saying is that there weren't any plants or trees because there were already created on day three and they didn't need rain and also didn't need man to take care of them. So the plants and trees of day three are something else. The plants and trees of today had not yet sprung up because they were dependent on rain which didn't come for 1,000 years and they needed man, which he only did after the fall.
Rain came after the fall when God created a totally different environment. The rainbow was proof of that. We can conclude then that different plants appeared after the fall and so it is right to say here they weren't on the earth. God is simply telling us that as we begin the generation of man, we are in a pre-fall environment. The fall led to rain, and the flood. The fall brought about certain plants which were not in there before the fall.
There were plenty of trees and plants, as was indicated back on day three. And they were used for man as it tells us in Genesis 1:29. When man was created, they were there already available for him but these particular two were not in existence. As stated in the words addressed by God to Adam after he sinned in Genesis 3:18, "Thorns and thistles, it shall bring forth to you and you shall eat the plants of the field.”
When God first created man, there were no thorns and thistles. Because there was no fallen-ness. It is a reference to those kinds of plants which are the product of man's tilling the soil. These species didn't exist until after Adam's transgression. It says, in Genesis 3:23, “therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.”
Verse 19, “By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread.” In the pre-fall world, there weren't any cultivated fields. Men didn't do that. In the original garden, there was a flourishing of everything that man could ever want to eat in varieties that were probably beyond description. Kiseido says, “And when the rains come in the land of Israel, the weeds flourish.”
When the story of man begins, there was no rain and no weeds. No man and no crops. When God planted the plants and trees on the third day, there was a world of vegetation. Trees and plants that naturally reproduced themselves by seed alone. But there were none of these thorns and thistles. Verse 6, “and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground.”
Now this has been the traditional idea that there was evaporation coming off the ground and watering the earth. But when we look directly into the original Hebrew text, we get a different picture. In the Hebrew language it says, “But the waters of the deep went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.” It literally means water that gushes up by itself out of the ground.
So the whole earth was watered, not by rain coming down but by water coming up from springs, covering the ground. The whole earth with all of its marvelous plants made on day three was literally saturated with water. There was no evaporation to the clouds that move over the land, dropping water and flowing across the earth and back into rivers and back into the sea and then evaporate again.
This certainly fits Genesis 2:10, “A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.” This is a spring-fed river literally gushing up out of the ground in the Garden of Eden, a source of water that creates a river that covers the entire garden. The ability of the earth to produce flourishing plants and trees was never dependent on rain which sometimes comes and sometimes does not.
Rain is a product of the fall. It wasn't that way in the original garden which meant there was no unpredictability. It didn't depend on anything and it wasn't something that God had to regulate as a blessing or a curse because there was only perfection and sinless-ness in His perfect world. Everything was constantly irrigated through the subterranean springs, and water was everywhere.
Genesis 13:10 says, “And Lot lifted up his eyes and saw that the Jordan Valley was well watered everywhere like the Garden of Eden. This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorra.” And so that's a picture of what it was like in Eden and all over the world before the fall. Kiseido writes, "Man would have continued to enjoy these conditions had he remained free from sin.”
All of a sudden, rain became a means by which God could bless or judge. So the original hydrological or water cycle was very different from what we know after the fall, after the great flood and now water comes a result of global continental mass air movement, annual seasonal temperature changes and it's in the hands of a sovereign God to give the rain, or to hold the rain back.
Jeremiah 5:24 says, “‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’ And so it was in that environment, verse 7, “then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Now we know that God created man in His own image from Genesis 1:26, but here, we are told how He did it. He formed man of dust. Job 10:8 says, "Your hands fashioned me and made me all together." Do you see any evolution in verse seven? Do you see any hominoid ancestors there? God literally created man out of the dust of the ground. And after he dies his body will return to dust.
Scripture says that God created man out of elements that are in the dust. And so what does this mean? Well, the basic chemical elements are nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, calcium and they make up everything. We are made out of the same basic chemical elements. That is why in I Corinthians 15:47 it says, "The first man is of the earth." God made man the same way He made dirt. No evolution at all.
God blows into his nostrils the breath of life. This is to convey the thought that though man had all the physical apparatus, all the organs for life, the reality of life is something that's not really part of those physical components. There is a transcendent reality of life that only God can give. God then blew into him life and all of the bodily organs started moving in their symbiotic harmony of life. It's the breath of life.
So God literally blew life into everything that lives, everything that is animated. It's the same word as "spirit" but only into man. Although He breathed life into all living creatures, only into man is God breathing life that is in His own image. And then, end of verse seven, "And the man became a living creature." It became a soul. God literally took that physical form and breathed into it life.
And so 1 Corinthians 15:45 says, "The first man, Adam, became a living being." There is no evolution here. There's no survival of the fittest. There is no transitional man. And I am constantly amazed at the bizarre, unfounded, confused ideas of evolution that have only created an irrational scheme to explain what God said in one verse, the creation of man. Let us pray.