Session 2: Week 5

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Genesis 2:16-25

16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of 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.”

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Why do you think יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים (Yehovah/Elohim) put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden (verse 9) and then command the man not to eat from it? 

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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.”

It’s interesting that after giving the commandment for the man to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we’re told of a helper being made for him. This seems to allude to the fact that Eve was created to help Adam obey God’s commands.

How does this apply in marriage relationships today?

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19 Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. 20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him. 21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. 22 The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.

This seems to teach us that for the man and woman to function together the way God ordained, the man would have to give of himself to the woman and then the woman would help the man obey God.

How is this played out in healthy marriages? 

What are some hindrances to seeing this manifest in healthy ways within a marriage relationship?

It’s in Genesis 2:22 that we’re told of God creating the woman. The number 22 is my favorite number because there are 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and that’s the language God chose to reveal His plans and love to us; and when you take one of the 2’s and mirror it against the other 2 you get a:

That being said, I think it’s pretty neat that this verse about the creation of a woman is numbered 22. ?  God loves us women! And, He loves the men too, for creating us from and for them.

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23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.” 24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

This idea of the divine unity (one flesh) of the man and woman demonstrate to us an aspect of Elohim, our divine Creator since we are created in His image.

The unity is seen in Jesus/Yeshua who was “One with the Father.” (John 10:30) (Ephesians 5:31-33)

This unity is also a picture of God Himself, who has an infinite number of attributes that contribute to the totality of the perfection of His being.

In what ways do we see the enemy of our souls try to break this divine unity between a husband and a wife?

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25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

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This last verse of Genesis 2 is extremely important; and gives us a key to God’s will for our emotional well being.  In it, we’re told that the man and his wife had no shame.

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What is shame?

  • a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety
  • the susceptibility to such emotion – have you no shame?
  • a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute
  • something that brings censure or reproach;also :  something to be regretted

The root of the Hebrew word translated as ashamed means “acted shamefully, became anxious, been put to shame, utterly dejected.”

God created man and woman unashamed.

Shame was the result of man’s disobedience to God, that we’ll read of in the next chapter; and if not for the work Jesus did on the cross, all of us would have to live with the overwhelming shame of sin.

Once we’re born-again, the price has been paid for God to take away our shame and we become new creatures who have the blessing and privilege of walking through life restored and unashamed.

It’s our choice, however, to lay down the things in our past that have brought us shame. By doing so we’ll walk in the joy of being unashamed; and conversely by refusing to do so we’ll remain prisoners of strongholds that the enemy sets up in our minds to bring us defeat and hamper our walks with the Lord.

What in your life do you need to lay down at the foot of the cross in order to experience freedom from shame?

If you find that you’re still burdened by things in your past (or present) that bring you shame it’s important to study the Word and come to a knowledge of the truth about what God says regarding guilt and shame.  Remember that the knowledge of the truth will set you free. God wants you to be free from all shame and guilt. That’s what Jesus died on the cross for!

Since the goal of this Bible study is to get to know God more intimately we’ll close Session 2 with an introduction to A.W. Tozer’s book “The Knowledge of the Holy.”  If you will spend time reading it during our break next month I promise your life will be changed, and your walk with the Lord enriched and empowered.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God. Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow. Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God. Thought and speech are God’s gifts to creatures made in His image; these are intimately associated with Him and impossible apart from Him. It is highly significant that the first word was the Word: “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We may speak because God spoke. In Him word and idea are indivisible. That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigrous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of  painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God. A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God. It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the MostHigh God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.  All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him. The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal  problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another. That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.

A.W. Tozer

 In what areas do you think that your thoughts about God need to change?

Let’s echo A.W. Tozer’s prayer as found in Chapter 7 of “The Knowledge of the Holy.”

“We worship Thee, the Father Everlasting, whose years shall have no end; and Thee, the love-begotten Son whose goings forth have been ever of old; we also acknowledge and adore Thee, Eternal Spirit, who before the foundation of the world didst live and love in coequal glory with the Father and the Son. Enlarge and purify the mansions of our souls that they may be fit habitations for Thy Spirit, who dost prefer before all temples the upright and pure heart. Amen.”

 

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