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After those very hasty remarks on the first creation story, ladies and gentlemen, we must perforce come now all too soon to the second creation story in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. According to the majority view of the commentators, chapter two verse four begins the second creation story, which, according to them, extends to the rest of chapter two and the whole of chapter three. Thereafter, they feel that chapter four goes on at some time later to tell us about events not necessarily connected with creation. And they may well be right. I, on the other hand, hold the eccentric position that, uh, the creation story beginning at chapter two verse four continues not only through the rest of chapter two and chapter three but carries on to the end of chapter four. For I hold that chapter four continues one of the basic themes, perhaps the central theme, of the second creation story. And to consider what that means, let us look both at our Bibles and at the film on the overhead projector. In the course of these three chapters, two, three, and four, the word ground recurs many times. I have listed a few of them for you on the screen. But it is not simply the fact that they occur many times that is significant. At each of the central and most significant point in each of those three chapters, the word the ground occurs. So it is in chapter two that we are told that man is made out of the ground. Chapter two, five and seven, man's body out of the ground, and again at three nineteen. Again in chapter, uh, uh, uh, two, we are told of man's prime function, the reason why he was made. He was made to till the ground from whence he was taken. And I suppose, I don't know, but I suppose he was meant to till that bit of the ground that lay around him and the bit of ground that now walked on two legs. Then we come to the solemnities of chapter three, when man sinned against God and ate of the forbidden. And at the center of the curse that was pronounced are the words in chapter three, seventeen, nineteen, and again in chapter twenty three. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. When thou tillest the ground, it shall bring forth to thee thorns and thistles, and by the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread now, until thou return to the ground from which you were taken. But notice how that theme recurs at the central point of the episode in chapter four, when Cain finally defied God, and in spite of God's pleading, refused to come to God in God's appointed way, and murdered Abel, then God pronounced another curse in relation to the ground. But upon inspection, you will see that the two curses are different. Both involve the ground, but otherwise are different. With Adam it was, cursed is the ground for thy sake. In toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground. Adam was made, his prime purpose in the second creation story was to till the ground. When he disobeyed God, he was not turned out of his employment, so to speak. He didn't lose the purpose for which God had made him. But now the conditions of his work were changed, and instead of being a gentleman's occupation, the work became, in large measure, hard labor, a kindly discipline of God for man in a fallen state. So when you till the ground, the ground is cursed and shall bring forth thorns and thistles, thistles. It will lead to the sweat of your brow. But notice how different is the curse pronounced in Cain's case. Not cursed is the ground for thy sake. When you till it, it will bring forth thorns and thistles. But now cursed art thou from the ground. When you till it, it won't yield to thee, to thee her strength. And Cain immediately saw the solemn implication of that. Man, I repeat, was made to till the ground. And though occupations by Cain's time had differentiated, so Abel was a keeper of flocks, Cain was still a tiller of the ground, carrying on the purpose for which his father had been made. But when Cain defied God, then God gave him his cards, if you won't mind the vulgar expression, and said, you might as well get out, Cain. You were made to till the ground, but when you till it now, it will not yield her strength to you. And Cain saw the solemn implication of it and said in his dismay, my punishment is greater than I can bear, for this day you have driven me out from the face of the ground. Cain went out, says the New Testament. The way of Cain went out from the presence of the Lord. He had lost the very reason for which man was made. That, when we come to it, will contain a very serious message, as you'll see. My point at the moment is simply to make it evident that the three chapters of the second creation story, at the very center of the most prominent part in each chapter, revolve around this idea of the ground. On those terms, I suggest that chapters two, three, and four group together as the second creation story. But now we must ask, what is the major point of the second creation story? We have seen some of the major points of the first creation story. What different aspect now confronts us in the second creation story? But this is going to be the story eventually of man's fall. He was told when he was made, of every tree in the garden you may eat. Only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of that you shall not eat. For the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. And in chapter three, he ate of the fruit and began the long process of dying at every level. And what I mean by that is, if we will understand what dying means, we first perhaps ought to consider what life means. What is life? What is human life? What goes up to making life, as the preachers say, with a capital L, but bother the capital. What makes life, what are the ingredients of life, do you see? What do you mean by life? You enjoy life? Marvelous. What do you mean? You enjoy breathing? Well, people do breathe if they're alive, and if they don't, persistently don't, after some years they die, of course. Yes. But is breathing the same as life? Is there that all there is to life? So I suggest to you that in chapter two, the first of the chapters of the second creation story, we have not a definition of life, but a very varied and colorful description of this many splendid thing that is life. And I invite you with me tonight to fold your arms, if you like. Be careful about nodding off to sleep at this late hour. You'll see. But, uh, I invite you just to sit back and enjoy yourself a moment and contemplate that delightful thing that is life, with which our wonderful Creator has enriched us. What is life? In chapter two verse seven we are told of man's makeup, what life means. Man has a material body, and then God breathed into his body the breath of life, and man became a living soul. We notice two things then. First of all, a material body is an integral part of what it means to be human. It is worth emphasizing because there have been sundry and still are sundry religions in this world and sundry philosophies that have despised the human body. The Greeks, for instance, of the kind of philosophy that Socrates and Plato embraced, despised the body. They invented the term soma sema, which means the body is a sepulcher. They held the view that they inherited, perhaps without knowing it, from Hinduism, that material is bad. The soul is the important thing, and that the wise man, therefore, will so live as to keep as far away from his body as he possibly can, so that the soul shall not be defiled by the body. That is still a prominent view in many theories of Hinduism, for instance. In the early church, some people were led astray by that idea as well, and Paul has to warn Timothy against those that forbid to eat certain meats, and they forbid marriage, as though marriage was somehow infradig and not a hundred percent good, as though it were unclean. And Paul describes such doctrines in very strong colors. He said they're doctrines of demons. It is God that has made our bodies, and God, if I may say so, is proud of what he made. God made the human body, and wonder of wonders to relate again. There came a time when God, our very God, took human form and became a human with a human body. The artists have waxed eloquent, and the poets about the glories, and particularly the artists and the sculptors about the human form, not my form in particular, but the human form in the abstract, so to speak. You'll see. Nobody's made a statue of me, I hope. But, uh, I tell you my Christian hope. You'll see. When the glorious morning of the resurrection comes, we shall not be disembodied and say, thank God there's my old body gone forever. We shall have a resurrected body. And the extraordinary thing to observe is that our salvation as human beings, I say it with bated breath, has changed the Godhead. For there were ages uncountable when the second person of the Trinity, as we describe him, did not have a body. Yet for our salvation's sake, I nearly said, who can believe it? But we do. The second person of the Trinity, verily God, yet became truly human and took a body like our body, made, was made in all things like as we, sin upon. And in his glorious resurrection, he has retained the body. When we speak of resurrection, it is precisely of the body that we speak, the resurrection of the body, a glorified human body. Different in some of its qualities from ours, for the first Adam was of the earth earthy. The second man is the Lord from heaven. The first human body was a soulish body. The glorified human body is a spiritual body. But as we have borne the image of the earthly, oh thank God, we shall bear the image of the heavenly. Be careful who you bump into in heaven, won't you? It might be me. You'll not recognize me at first. Ah, I shall look so glorious, you see, and so will you, incidentally. As C. S. Lewis would to say, you see, you're sitting next, if you're sitting next to a believer, you're sitting next to someone superior to angels. And if you saw that dear sister sitting by your side, as she will be in glory, if you could see it like that, like that now, you would be sorely tempted to bow at her feet and worship her, like John was when he saw an angel, and the angel had to pick him up by the hair of his head and say, no, no, no, John, you don't worship angels. Wow. Believe it, my brother? The wonder of the creation of the human body. The wonder of the incarnation of our Lord. The fact that he offered that body without spot to God on our behalf. The glorious fact we shall have a resurrection body like his. Let none of us despise the human body, even though from time to time we groan within it. But man is not just body. Man is soul. There lay Adam's body on the ground, complete in one sense, but incomplete in another, for it was as dead as a proverbial doornail. Until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. Nowadays, there are those, and some evangelicals included, who will tell us that man is monistic. Man doesn't have a soul, he is a soul. And that therefore, when the human body dies, nothing remains. And therefore, the person is for a while not there, dead, so to speak. But they will be raised again when the Lord Jesus comes. That won't do, even though perhaps it's an attempt to accommodate Christian doctrine to modern theories of physics. It is unthinkable for this reason, amongst others. If it were true that man doesn't have a soul, it's just his body, which has a sort of soulish dimension as part of the physics. Then when our Lord died at Calvary, the man Jesus ceased to exist, didn't he? Is that thinkable? Today, said he to the dying thief at his side, thou shalt be with me in paradise this day. Not with me in the grave, but with me in paradise. And Paul, the holy apostle, tells us in two Corinthians five that, eh, while we are in the body, we are absent from the Lord. In a sense, we are. We are like resident aliens away from home. But absent from the body. Also, Paul, we can be absent from the body, can we? Yes, indeed, says he. Absent from the body, present with the Lord. And the thought has comforted the funerals of millions of believers, absent from the body, present with the Lord. I don't want, says Paul, to go through that state where my soul is naked, unclothed with the body. I prefer to go immediately at the Lord's coming, so that mortality might be swallowed up of life, and I might be clothed upon with my body, which is from heaven. But it's not escapism, says Paul, when I say I long for that eternal body. It's the Holy Spirit within, who is the earnest of our inheritance. And so marvelous is the life of the Spirit and the enrichment thereof, that a believer who has the Holy Spirit and senses those heavenly and spiritual and eternal joys will, from time to time, long to be home, not as escapism or running away, but like the bulb of a daffodil longs to be a flower that's called a daffodil, that's why. Yes, glorious. What it means to be a human being, what human life is, body and soul. But secondly, you see, we come to, uh, the next feature in Genesis chapter two, and that is the next wonderful feature about human life, the ability to work. Perhaps you didn't immediately recognize that as a, a, as a glorious part of life. You're looking for the time when you can go to heaven, my dear brother. When all our labours and trials are o'er, we reach that heavenly shore, sit down on the heavenly sofa and put our feet up on the heavenly footrest, and never do a stroke of work again, so that heaven is some old people's home. Nonsense, of course. Nonsense. When you get home to glory, you won't want to sit still, goodness me not, with the eternal energies that you'll have. And you'll want to work like God works. You know, God, my Father worketh hitherto, and I work, says the Lord. And I remind you, God doesn't have to work to earn a living. Does he now? But he works. Why do you think he works? I must guard my language, but I nearly said he works for the fun of it. You imagine the sheer joy and exhilaration of creating a galaxy or two. Hmm? Wouldn't you, if you could? Ha. I hope we get time off from singing he- hymns in heaven, now and again. For if they still have galaxies, they're going to have a new Earth as well as a new heaven. I would like to go and inspect what they're all about, wouldn't you? You just think of the endless ingenuity of divine creative wisdom. God expresses himself in his works, and as sons and daughters of the living God, so shall you for all eternity. Work. God, I'm told, he made man to till the ground, and originally it was a gentleman's occupation. Well, we're told that God Almighty created a garden in Eden, which suggests that the rest of the world wasn't garden, doesn't it? God didn't make the whole world a garden. He made a bit of it a garden and showed dear old Adam what could be done with the world. What about that, Adam, do you see? Just look at that. There's a daffodil there. Look at that. And what you could do if you arranged the flowers like this and the trees like this. What a thing of beauty you could make of this earth and its potential. Marvelous, wasn't it? I am full of admiration, but not, not that I've got much creative ability myself, but that marvelous ability that God has given to human beings to copy the Creator and engage in creative occupation. From the farmer who makes something of the world, and the woman who makes a lovely tapestry or cookery or what have you. Glorious, isn't it? Work. And the marvelous development of the earth and space, would that it all been done by believers in God cooperating with God as sons with the Father. Alas, that so much has been done by atheistic minds. But the sheer ingenuity are even those minds a mark of the God-given potentials of the human for work, for developing the world and the universe. Glorious work. Oh, you say, we with my arthritic knees. Oh, well, I know, my dear brother. I have them too. But we live as fallen creatures in a world where work under the disciplines of the Father has necessarily for us fallen human beings been turned into a severe discipline on time. There's still something of the joy that remains, surely. Work then, part of life. It's not merely that if a man work not, he shall not eat. It's part of what it means to be alive. And then there's the aesthetic sense. For did you notice what it is said that God made this garden, you'll see, at verse nine of chapter two, Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is, now notice the two descriptions, pleasant to the sight and good for food. And I like the order that God chose to put it in. Not good for food, and then perchance pleasant to the sight, but pleasant to the sight first, and then good for food. We need the food to fill our stomachs, don't we, and give us physical satisfaction. Of course we do, without which we can't carry on living. But which would you rate, uh, the more important? Beauty and aesthetic delight to satisfy the mind and the senses, or food to satisfy the stomach? Which would you think is the more important? Sometimes Christians have seemed to have the view to me that, uh, food and all that kind of thing is jolly good, but art isn't or something. Don't know why that is. If you had a friend dangerously ill in hospital and you wanted to take something to help them, what would you take? A bag of carrots? Well, now you say, no, not a bag of carrots. Might kill the man. Well, what then? You say a beautiful bunch of flowers. Oh, what would you do that for? What good are flowers? Who would you say, poor dear man, looking now and again at these flowers will capture some of the beauty of it, and, and, and yes, what? It'll make him feel better, won't it? Revive the desire for life. Would you come and play on a harp, maybe? Aesthetic things can be more important than even food sometimes, can't they? I don't know what the recipes will be like in heaven. Perhaps we shall eat, who knows? Our Lord said we shall eat and drink with him in his kingdom. I think food will not be the predominant thing anyway, but the aesthetic sense. Oh, how wonderfully satisfying. And even when it comes to dress, you know, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not criticizing the author, I wouldn't dare, I'm no position to, but, uh, our Lord had distinct ideas on dress, didn't he? He said, look at the lilies of the field. They don't toil or spin, or rather they don't card or spin, is what he said, to card woolen material. They don't card or spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Oh, what a beautiful color. I do admire a God that hasn't made this a utility universe with everything in black and white, don't you? The color. Marvelous God. Part of life, isn't it? Imagine being bo- born in a cell with no windows and no light, in the dark. All your life in the dark, would you count it living? And then, of course, uh, as well as the aesthetic sense, the potential for moral values. Two nine verses, uh, chapter two verse nine. He put there the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Admittedly, God put it under a ban to start with. But there it was, the po- potential for the understanding of moral values. Knowledge of good and evil. Both in the sense that he of Hebrew inclusivism, that's everything there is. And in the moral sense of good and evil, ethically and morally. That's a marvelous thing that God has done with human beings, isn't it? After all, we are a little bit better than dogs, aren't we? Your dog, even your most beloved Fido, has no potential for understanding morality. I think you've observed it. You can train the dog not to go next door and steal the joint of beef off the table from your neighbor's kitchen. You can train him not to do it, and you do it by belaboring him with a stick or something every time he goes anywhere near the neighbor's door. So, a la Pavlov, you'll see he gets the impression every time he, um, gets to near the neighbor's door, somehow associated in his doggy mind with a painful posterior. So he desists. But you'll never teach the dog why it's wrong to steal the next door neighbor's food. Can't sit him down and say, now fight ho, don't do that again. I've told you not to do it before, and you know it's wrong, Fido dear. That's no use. Has got potential for moral values. We have, don't we? And mightily important they are. We have suffered too long from psychiatrists that have said that, uh, no, there's no ultimate right or wrong. I remember meeting a psychi- uh, Christian psychiatrist from large psychiatric hospital in Bristol in England, a dear, vigorous, high-powered intellectual he was too. He had a reputation in that city and in that hospital for getting more cures than any other psychiatrist in the establishment. I heard him give a seminar at which he explained some of his success. He said, you know, when we are summoned to the courts to deal with criminals, the judge or the magistrate will try to get us to say that the man didn't know the difference between right and wrong, and didn't know what he was doing, and cannot be blamed. Now, in some cases, that might be true, but in a lot of cases it didn't, because a moral sense is part of it wa- is part of what it means to be human. He said, if my patients get into tantrums and break the window pane in a window, he says, I make them pay for it. Not to be stingy, but to bring them back to what is a feature of being human. Moral understanding, moral responsibility. To deprive a person of it and to say that they don't have it is to turn them into a cabbage. God not even to get us saved, will bypass our moral judgment. Be warned, those who use all sorts of psychological devices to bypass people's moral judgment and to make them give a profession of Christian faith. God will never do it. It is what is part of being human, that he give us, gives us the potential to understand morality, because we need to understand God eventually. In him is no sin. And then, of course, there is moral responsibility in our relationship with God. You shall not take of the tree of life, says God, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. So man was forbidden for the time being, at any rate, to take of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. But now will you notice a very important thing about human life. He was strictly forbidden to take of that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But he found, if he chose to take it, he had the ability to take it. Do you follow the reasoning? No permission to take it, but the ability to take it. He could decide to take it. And the awesome thing is he had the ability to go against God. You say, that's sinning, isn't it? Yes. You say, who gave him that ability? I repeat, not the permission to take of the fruit, but the ability, if he chose to, to take it. There's only one answer to that, is God gave him the ability, not the permission. And what does that mean? Why, in short terms, God gave us free will, that's what it means. Didn't make us like bumblebees. If a bee or a mosquito alights on your royal forehead and stings you, you don't say, you wicked, immoral being, and summon it before the magistrate. He was guilty of biting me. Of course you don't. They're made like cocks, aren't they? They just go. Man isn't made simply like a clock. There are many automatic systems in the human brain, of course. Thank God for the autopilots in the human brain. Bada supre glory of a human being made in the image of God is that God himself gave us free will. And why is that important? Well, there cannot be any true mora- morality without free will, can there? If I have no choice about a thing, and I do it without any choice, if it's good, you mustn't give me the credit because I couldn't help doing it. And if it's bad, you mustn't blame me because I couldn't help doing it. I was, I was programmed to do it. Therefore, there's no morality if you're just programmed. If human beings were to grow up, and from being innocent to become fully moral human beings, they must have free choice. The awesome thing is that the creator himself gave them not permission, but the ability to choose to obey and please God, or not to. And the awesome thing is that at the Great White Throne, when men and women have chosen to reject God, God himself will not override their choice, but honor their choice to all eternity, though it be eternal disaster. God will not remove our free choice, not even to save us. Mark it well. For if he removed our free choice to save us, what he would save would no longer be a full human being, but more like a machine. Moral responsibility then, part of what it means to be a human being and to be alive, and to have a conscience that is seared or completely dead, is to die at one level of human life. Not to have any aesthetic sense is to lose a part of life, isn't it? Then, of course, there was the gift of language. What a wonderful gift that is, as every lady knows. You say, where did you get that from out of this chapter? Well, I noticed that God called the animals before Adam, and Adam named them. There implied is that wonderful thing that we call language. As a young man, I worked under a professor of Latin who wrote a book on Latin syntax. Not everybody's favorite topic, but would that more people studied it. Because language is the expression of logic. And Woodcock pointed out that here in Genesis was a remarkable indication of language. For human language depended on the brilliant notion of somebody or other, was it Adam? To use an arbitrary sound as a label for something or someone. Of course, in language you can get onomatopoeic things, you know, when you go bash, and by the sound you imitate, uh, what's happened. You bash something, or something crashes, or it went bang. All words that imitate the sound. But that's a very small part of language. All sophisticated languages have developed this arbitrary system of using arbitrary sounds to label something with. So we in England, if you get the thing in the, in the ground that comes up with a big trunk and has branches and leaves on, we English and you here, honourable Canadians and Acadians and all that, you make the sound tree. You see, that's more than the Romans did when they met such an object, they called it arbo. And that's different from what the Greeks, the sound the Greeks made when they saw a, a, a tree, they called it dendron. Arbitrary sound. And therefore, because of their almost limitless, limitless possibilities, able to form vocabulary. Marvelous gift of language, you know, isn't it delightful? Hope you like words and language. Yes. I see you do. And... and what is more, you know, the modern linguists have shown, haven't they, many of them, not all of them, that it would appear that human beings have an inbuilt linguistic faculty, language faculty. Noel Chomsky, of course, atheist and as red as red communists as could be, came round to the view that human beings have some inbuilt language. The alternative view of the evolutionists is that human language evolved out of animal grunts. You know, well, sometimes you might think it, but uh, you'll see, but uh, uh, the theory was, you see, if a pig running around suddenly got round of a rock and there was a lion, the pig went, ooh. And when it had done that many times, having met many lions, all the other pigs learned to recognize that when pig number one said, ooh, that meant lion, you'll see. And the notion was that animal language evolved out of that, more or less. That is nonsense, you know. You think the subtlety of language. Doesn't matter which language. You take a five-year-old child, and a five-year-old child can understand met many lions. All the other pigs learn to recognize that when pig number 1 said, ooh, that meant lion, you'll see. And the notion was that animal language evolved out of that, more or less. That is nonsense, you know. You think the subtlety of language, doesn't matter which language. You take a five-year-old child, and a five-year-old child can understand quite sophisticated logic, can it not? It can understand hypothetical conditions. You say, what are they like? Well, mother says to five-year-old, now Tommy, if you are good this afternoon, mummy will give you an ice cream for tea. That's a hypothetical condition, isn't it? If you are good. You mightn't be, but certainly hypothetical. And the consequence will follow. You'll get an ice cream, and the little toddler understands that. You try saying the same thing to your dog Fido. Fido, if you are good this afternoon, give you a bone. Doesn't understand it lacks that facility for logic that lies behind language. That is exceedingly important. Don't tell people they don't need to spell, they don't need to trouble about syntax. If you do that, what you're saying is they don't trouble about logic. And God has given us the facility. Amazing, isn't it? The language. And then the poetry of it. And the beauty of it. Don't say it's just words, will you? Oh, we know what you mean, that words can be empty sounds without any real sincere meaning behind them. But the gift of language given to us. So ultimately we might have converse and fellowship with him whose name is the Word. Magnificent facility. To be able to hold conversation with the living God and with him who is the Word, the communication of the living God to us, with our language faculty. Amazing, isn't it? And then, of course, there was another side to life, and that is the relationship between man and woman. Some say it's the highest possible form of life. It's certainly a pinnacle, isn't it? Sacred. Because it is... an example... in the lowly form of human life, of what the relationship God had in mind for Christ and the church. It was that way round when God created the relationship between man and woman, wasn't it? It wasn't that having done that for biological necessity, God subsequently thereafter thought, I know what, that could also serve as a, as a sort of a pattern for Christ in the church. It's not that way round, my brothers, my sisters. Long before God created man and woman, says Ephesians chapter one, he had it in mind that we should become children of God and corporately the very bride of Christ. And modeled on that, God created human marriage. What a glorious thing it is. It was a disaster when the early church fathers got it into their head that there was something infradig with marriage, and commanded priests to be celibate. That it is distortion of the mind of God. Yes, it is true, as our Lord taught us, that to some is given the special role of remaining single, but is not the norm. Each one has his gift from God, says the Apostle Paul. The gift to get married or a gift to be single. Both have their advantages in this way or the other way, for fulfilling life's chief purpose, which is to glorify God in our bodies. And then chapter three will tell us that humans made in such way as they can be tempted by that evil spirit himself, that is Satan. We are midway, in some sense, aren't we, between the spirit world and the animal world. We have bodies like animals have. Angels don't have them normally, in our sense of the term. But unlike animals, we have spirit. And to keep human being in balance, we must have respect to both realms. When human beings cease to believe in the reality of the spirit world, they are in great danger of descending to living like animals, merely. And finally, if we progress through the civilization that rose from Cain's descendants, we read of other things, like, for instance, uh, the development of metallurgy, of music, of lyric poetry. Some people have argued that these things were invented by Cain's descendants and therefore must be wicked. That is not so, is it? Atheists, for instance, I dare say, um, invented heart pacers, whatever, pacemakers for the heart. We don't say I shan't use them because they were made by an atheist, do we? Watch out, that wristwatch you have might have been made by an atheist. It's a sad thing that human ability in technology and in literature and in music and art, express man's fallen nature and rejection of God's values. That's a sad thing. But the ability itself is a marvelous thing to be admired and to be enjoyed. What does it mean to be alive? It means all these wonderful things. Let us tonight, before we go to sleep, bow our heads and give God thanks for the many splendors of sheer human life. Yes, you will tell me that you have more than that. God has given you eternal life, the very life of God. Self-evidently more important. But human life, all pray remember the dignity that God has given to human life, not only in making us with all these many abilities and facilities and potentials and enjoyments. He honored humanity by his son becoming human, and have carried humanity to above the angels, to the very right hand of God, and shall remain human forever, though forever eternally God. And we're joined to him, to bodily join him one day on the pinnacle of the universe. What it means, human life. Tomorrow, in our first session, we must continue with unfinished business from this second study, briefly to consider what happened when first Adam sinned and then Cain rebelled. But for the moment, let's bow our heads in gratitude to God and thank him for his word. Our Father, we do thank thee for this beautiful thing, this human life that thou has given us. So often we take it for granted, Lord. Yet seeing it as we see it from our side as members of a fallen race, yet with many of its glories lingering still around us, we bow our knees and hearts tonight before thee and give thee unfeigned thanks for the lovely thing that is human life. For the wonderful facility of language, that thou mayest converse with us in words, and we to thee in words, and have fellowship with him who is the word of God. O God, we thank thee for this glorious facility that thou hast given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Help us as good stewards to use this life in all its parts, not merely for our enjoyment, but for thy glory. Assured through thy Son's redemption, resurrection, ascension, and coming again, that this life is but the prelude, the antechamber to that glorious eternal life that we shall share with thee in an undying eternity. Already we bless thee. We sense the glory of it as we taste the first fruits of it in the spirit thou has given us, and rejoice with joy unspeakable and already tinged with the glory of our eternal inheritance. So we thank thee for thy word, and bless thee now, and pray thine evening grace and peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.