The Forgotten Glory of Being Human
July 18, 2025 - Genesis 2:1-17
I’m Pastor Rich Bitterman, a country preacher from the Ozarks. Guy Howard, the old Walking Preacher, once wore out his boots traveling from church to church, meeting strangers and sharing the gospel. I’m doing the same today on digital roads. Each post is a visit. Each verse is a step. Let’s walk the Word together.
🪔 Today’s Truth:
You were not born for chaos. You were formed for a garden, fashioned for glory, and filled with God’s breath.
Genesis 2:1-17
Before the flood. Before Cain struck his brother in a lonely field. Before the sweat, the thorns, the pain of labor…there was a garden.
Not a story passed down around a fire. A real place with rivers that flowed, trees that shaded the earth, and soil still untouched by curse. Eden was not a dream. It was the first home. And in its center, God placed a man.
Formed from dust. Breathed into with life. Crowned with purpose.
We forget who we are when we forget where we came from. Genesis 2 isn’t just a record of origins, it is a mirror. In Adam, we see the truth about ourselves: created for glory, bound to obedience, capable of love, but capable of ruin.
A Map with a Shaded Square
Genesis 1 unfolds like a panoramic photograph…heavens, stars, oceans, beasts, birds, all formed by word alone. Then Genesis 2 slows the shutter. It frames one corner of that cosmic picture and says: Here. Look closer.
What had been painted in broad strokes is now etched in fine detail. God, who spoke galaxies into being, bends low. He shapes a man from earth’s crust and breathes spirit into still lungs. He does not do this for birds or beasts. Only for man.
Some have tried to divide the two chapters. They speak of different authors, conflicting stories. But Jesus never did. In one sentence, He quoted from both chapters and called them one truth. Not myth. History.
The garden was real, and so was the man.
The Rest That Still Stands
Six days. That’s all it took. Just six days for God to speak a universe into order. And on the seventh, He rested.
Not because He was weary. But because the work was done. There is no mention of evening and morning on that day. It stands open-ended, echoing through time.
From that, the week was born. Not from lunar cycles or planetary spins. Not from human invention. From God Himself. Six days to labor, one to rest. A rhythm woven into the marrow of man.
Break that rhythm and things break in us. France tried. Russia tried. Every attempt to abolish the seven-day cycle has ended in chaos. Our bones remember what God wrote into time.
Adam remembered it too. Before sin touched his skin, he worked. He cultivated. He ordered. He named. His hands bore purpose, not toil. His labor was not punishment but praise.
The carpenter of Nazareth would one day echo this pattern. He who was with God in creation would swing a hammer in silence for thirty years.
Dust and Breath
Then the Lord God formed the man.
Not with a wand. But with His hands. The word used is the same one used of a potter shaping clay.
And then…He breathed.
No other creature received that breath. Only Adam. A living soul, awakened by the breath of God.
The body, yes, was dust. Carbon and calcium. Chemicals you could tally. But the breath was priceless. It marked man with eternity. It set him apart.
We are not clever animals. We are not the result of random mutation. We are not what the textbooks say. We are dust made holy by breath.
Even now, broken as we are, we carry the echoes of Eden. We write songs. We tell stories. We long for justice. We bury our dead. We dream of forever.
Show me the ape who mourns. Show me the dolphin who paints. You won’t. Because they are not us. We were made to worship.
Eden Had Borders
Moses records the rivers. He draws the edges. This wasn’t a spiritual garden floating in metaphor. It had dirt, stones, trees. Eden could be mapped.
God did not throw Adam into wilderness. He prepared a place. A garden planted by God, not man. Fruit trees for food. Canopies for shade. And in its center, two trees: one for life, the other for choice.
God gave Adam all of it. Except one.
One tree. One command.
Not because God is petty. But because love always requires obedience. And obedience requires a line you do not cross.
The Man Who Worked
Adam was not a half-formed brute mumbling beside a fire. He was brilliant. Articulate. Upright in body and in soul.
He worked the soil with reverence. He named the animals with clarity. He was not an inventor of language. He was born speaking.
Work was not a sentence. It was a song.
He tilled. He kept. He governed. He was not just a gardener…he was a steward of God’s creation. His task was simple, sacred, and satisfying. He had no sweat. No thorns. No aching back. Just purpose, perfectly fitted to his frame.
We forget that work preceded sin. We forget that rest was patterned by God. We forget that the man who obeyed was also a man who labored.
Jesus labored too. He did not despise the work of His hands. Neither should we.
The Test
Amid trees ripe for the picking, one stood forbidden.
And that was enough.
The test was not cruel. It was clear. Eat of every tree, but not this one. The command was not ambiguous. It was direct. God withheld nothing but what would destroy.
Still, the man would reach. Still, he would fall. But not yet. Not in this chapter.
This chapter holds its breath.
Here is man in perfection. Here is obedience before rebellion. Here is paradise not yet lost.
We Remember the Garden
We do not read Genesis 2 to fantasize about what was. We read it to remember what we were.
You were made for more than scrolling and surviving. You were made to cultivate, to create, to walk with God in the cool of the day.
You were made to obey. And you were made to rest.
The gospel doesn’t merely cleanse your record. It restores your humanity. Christ, the second Adam, obeyed where the first rebelled. He took the curse so that the breath might fill us again.
You will not return to Eden. But you will arrive in a garden-city where the tree of life stands once more.
Genesis 2 is not the end. It is the beginning of the ache. The longing for home. The reason we hunger for righteousness, for peace, for God.
We began in a garden. We were sent out. But in Christ, we will walk beneath the trees again.
And this time, we won’t reach for death.
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One kitten caught! Three more to go.
The return to Eden will never happen as long as we ignore the Biblical diet God gave us in Genesis 1. Plants, not animals, are to be food. God gave every green herb, not every bloody animal. Eden begins in our hearts and stomachs.