Adam
The last thing I’d like to show you before we move along is this:
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
(Gen. 1:28 KJV)
God told Adam to replenish the earth. Adam couldn’t replenish the earth unless
there was something there before…something to replenish! He could FILL the
earth, but in order to REPLENISH the earth, there had to have been something
there to replenish…(just a little food for thought!). Now…
“When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens—and no shrub of the field
had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for
the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the
ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of
the ground—the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
(Gen. 2:4-7)
Have you ever stopped to think that when Adam was created, there was nothing
here? “No shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the
field had yet sprung up…” when “…the Lord God formed the man from the dust
of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…”
There was just Adam…and more dust. You and I have had the luxury of having
a growing conciousness of life. Sometime before our births, or at the very latest,
AT our births, we became aware of our own existance a little at a time. As we
grew, so did the awareness of our “being”. From birth, we learned to walk and
talk and do all the things we do today.
But Adam…Adam wasn’t…and then, all of a sudden, he was. Boom! Not there
one minute, and the next minute, there’s Adam! What in the world, must it have
been like? To “not be” and then in the blink of an eye, “to be”….sitting there looking
around at….at what? More dust….
He was apparently created with intellegence, along with his own language and
motor skills because God brought the animals to him to see what he would name
them (Gen. 2:19,20). Just for the record, now you know why an elephant is an
elephant and a zebra is a zebra!
Adam was what you might call the first of many “snapshots” of Jesus. Adam was
created a perfect man. In him, as he was created, there was no sin. In Adam was
the culmination of God’s creative work…the thing that took creation from “good” to
“very good” as God saw them. He was God’s companion, tending to God’s work
(as we shall see), and bringing God glory…just by being himself in his perfect state!
So, in a sense, he was a brief glimpse or snapshot of Jesus, as Jesus would come
to be known. Sort of a foretelling, you might say…
To get back on topic, God decided that Adam needed a suitable helper, put Adam
into a deep sleep, took out one of his ribs, and when Adam awoke…for the very first
time, he met Eve. Flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones…woman. And, according to
Gen. 2:25, they were man and wife!
“Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the
man he had formed.” (Gen. 2:8)
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