The First Temple

Scripture: Genesis 2: 4-25

Sermon: The First Temple

Topics: Creation, Temple, Longing

Preached: September 16, 2012, Woodlawn

Rev. Mike Abma

Genesis 2: 4-25

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ⁵when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; ⁶but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—⁷then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,^* and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. ⁸And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. ⁹Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

10 A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. ¹¹The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; ¹²and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. ¹³The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. ¹⁴The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. ¹⁶And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; ¹⁷but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’

18 Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ ¹⁹So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man^* there was not found a helper as his partner.

²¹So 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 its place with flesh. ²²And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³Then the man said,

‘This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

this one shall be called Woman,^*

for out of Man^* this one was taken.’

²⁴Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. ²⁵And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

When I was a senior in High School I visited Calvin College for the first time. It made an impression. To be honest, it was not what was happening in the classrooms that I was most impressed by. It was the campus. I found it a beautiful campus, all the same brick, all built in the same style. Eventually I learned that the person behind the master plan of this campus was an architect named William Fyfe, someone who studied in the Frank Lloyd Wright School in Wisconsin. That is why this campus has that Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie Style look. The style is also called Organic Architecture. Organic Architecture was the guiding principle of all of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building– it is when the structure and appearance of a building tries to fit into the natural or organic features of the site it is built on.

If you know any Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, you get a sense of this – whether it is the Meyer May house here in the Heritage Hill district,

or the homes he designed in the Oak Park neighborhood in Chicago,

or Frank Lloyd Wright’s own home called Teli’esen, built right into a hill in Wisconsin.

But perhaps it is clearest in his most famous home, the one on the bulletin cover, known as Falling Water, just outside of Pittsburgh. Here we have a home so well placed and designed in that setting, that the American Institute of Architects named that house the “best all-time work of American architecture.”

Then I saw a Ken Burns documentary on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. I learned Frank Lloyd Wright was not a nice man. He was arrogant, self-absorbed, and narcissistic. He was childish and prone to temper-tantrums. He was a spendthrift, a compulsive twister of the truth in shameless attempts of self-promotion. And perhaps, most telling of all, in a reckless act of selfishness, he abandoned his wife Kitty and his 6 children, and took off to Europe with his mistress.

So how is it that this self-absorbed and rather nasty man, could design such gorgeous buildings?

I am not sure how to answer that, but Frank Lloyd Wright seemed to have a relentless drive to design places that took you beyond words,

places that made you want to sing – in a major key –

places of such order and beauty, that they enfolded you in peace and serenity.

What gives places the feeling of peace and serenity?

Aren’t these places close to nature?

Aren’t these buildings that do not dominate the landscape,

but rather grace the landscape.

Aren’t places of peace and serenity places

where we can hear the waves roll onto shore,

where we can hear the trickling of a brook,

where we can hear birds singing in the trees,

where we can watch bees and butterflies in verdant gardens.

This isn’t simply a Western thing – it is universal. In 1915, when the Japanese people wanted to build a Shinto Shrine to honor their recently departed Emperor Meiji, they surrounded the shrine with over 170 acres of forests, and fields, and gardens, and trickling brooks. Why? So that visitors would feel a sense of peace and serenity when they came.

When we are attracted to building homes

beside mountains and streams,

in forests and fields

surrounded by gardens and trees,

there is something spiritual going on here,

and it is rooted in Eden.

It is rooted in that time and that place

when we literally walked and talked with God in the garden

while the dew was still on the roses.

THE FIRST TEMPLE

In many ways, Genesis 1 sings the song of the creative genius of God, the master architect and builder.

In seven poetic stanzas, Creation came into being.

God said, and it was so.

God saw, and it was good.

Now here, in Genesis 2, the focus is on how we human beings fit into this world.

In this big new creation,

our first home is in Eden,

and Eden is called a garden.

Now this is what I would like you to think about this morning.

I would like you to think about this Garden of Eden as also being the first Temple.

I know this sounds strange.

We tend to think of Temples as buildings of some sort.

But in the Biblical use of the word,

temple is that place where God and his people meet.

And the Garden of Eden is clearly where God met Adam and Eve.

It is where God delighted in them,

they delighted in God,

and together, they both delighted in creation.

So that is one reason, perhaps the main reason, to see the Garden of Eden as the First Temple – it was the first place where God met his people.

But there are more reasons – subtle reasons.

There are connections between the way this Garden of Eden is described, and the things that we find later in the Tabernacle and Temple. Let me list some of them:

First of all, we are told God planted the Garden of Eden in the east (2:8). In Genesis 3:24 we are told that the cherubim guarded the entrance to the Garden which was on the east side. Did you know that the entrance to the Tabernacle and later the Temple was on the east side? (Ex. 38:13)

Then we are told there was a Tree of Life in the middle of the Garden. Did you know that the Lampstand in the Tabernacle and later the Temple, the Lampstand with seven branches that stood just outside the Holy of Holies was crafted to look like a tree – like the Tree of Life?

Then we have another Tree — the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Here is something in the Garden that said to Adam and Eve that they couldn’t live any way they wanted. There were limits. Transgressing those limits was a matter of life and death. If they ate of that Tree, they would die. In the temple, in the Holy of Holies, there was the Ark of the Covenant. In that Ark were the tablets of the Law – tablets that told God’s people that they couldn’t live any way they wanted. There were limits. Transgressing those limits was a matter of life and death. If they touched that ark, they would die.

There is also that odd detail about the land being filled with gold, bdellium, and onyx. Why is that included? Again, there is a temple connection with each of these:

* it just so happens that onyx was the precious stone found in the ephod that the Temple Priests wore;

* in the only other mention of the word bdellium in the Old Testament —

and let me say that word again: bdellium — this bdellium is described as

looking like manna – and manna, you may remember, was also kept in the

ark of the covenant;

* and lastly, gold is mentioned. Gold has a more obvious connection with

the Tabernacle and Temple because practically everything in the Holy of

Holies was covered in gold.

One last Garden of Eden and Temple connection. In this Genesis account, we have God putting Adam in the Garden and giving him the job of tilling it and keeping it. It just so happens that these two Hebrew verbs are the same verbs used to describe the job of the priests in the Temple. Only then they are translated as serving and protecting – priests serve in the Temple and protect or guard it from any unclean thing.

Can you see how it fits to call the Garden of Eden the first Temple,

and how it fits that Adam was the first priest?

GRACING NOT DOMINATING CREATION

A while ago I read about a movement called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. They apparently love this planet so much, and are so concerned about its health, that they think the world would be better off without humans. Without humans, “Earth will be allowed to return to its former glory.”

In their way of thinking

Animals and nature are good,

humanity and culture are bad.

But that is not how the opening chapters of Genesis read.

Humanity is supposed to be intimately involved with creation:

getting to know it;

giving it names;

being fruitful and multiplying

allowing the Garden to flourish

so that the Garden,

the order, the peace and the serenity of the Garden

extends to all those fields where there were no plants

and all those spaces where there were no herbs.

That is the picture we have here of this first Temple.

And it is helpful to see it as a temple because that word reminds us that

not only were Adam and Eve enjoying the fruits of creation;

not only were they delighting in each other,

but they were also glorifying God.

The Garden of Eden was, first of all, a place of worship.

Glorifying God was at the heart of this picture of paradise,

this picture of joy beyond words.

HUMAN LONGING

You know the story.

We retold it at the beginning of the service.

You know how we abandoned God, and tried to live without him.

You know the story of how we lost that first home, our first temple.

Our present earth is not what Eden once was.

And we are not what Adam and Eve were originally created to be.

Sin and sorrow, thorns and thistles, have gotten in the way.

But here is the thing – we live with a constant longing,

a constant ache, to get back… to get back to that first Temple,

to be back in the presence of God

with nothing in the way.

The Psalms talk about this desire to be in God’s presence and to see his face again and again.

Remember what Psalm 27:4 says?

It says

“One thing I ask. One thing I seek.

To live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life;

To behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”

The house of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,

doesn’t only refer to that building of brick and stone in Jerusalem.

It also refers to the First Temple,

when everything was good,

and heaven was everywhere

and we could see God face to face.

The Episcopal priest, Alan Jones, once wrote

that a human being is by definition a longing for God.

He wrote that the whole aim of spiritual life is to keep that longing alive.

What is this longing called?

Thomas Aquinas called it the summum bonum – the supreme good.

John Calvin called it the sensus divinitatis – the sense of the divine.

C.S. Lewis called it Sehnsucht – a German word for yearning.

Call it what you will,

but it is that stab of longing that comes over us,

when the sun suddenly breaks through some drifting clouds,

or a breeze suddenly rustles through the maple leaves,

or when we are totally captivated by a squirrel just outside Heimenga Hall.

It is those moments of overwhelming beauty when we sense that God is near,

those stabs of joy when we sense that he is close.

These are the moments we wish we could capture,

and contain,

and lengthen to last a lifetime.

But we can’t.

They are fleeting.

CONCLUSION

I imagine that one of the reasons you are here this morning

is because there have been times in your life

when you have felt that stab of longing,

those shimmering, glimmering moments of unexplainable joy

when everything was delight.

I imagine you are here because you are hungry for more,

searching for more.

I imagine you are here because,

whether you even fully realize it or not

you are sighing for Eden,

and longing for the beauty of the Lord in that First Temple.

Well here is the good news:

God longs to have you back even more than you want Him back.

God wants us back so much, he came in person, to win us back.

To win us back,

he went through a garden — not of delight, but of sorrows;

he was nailed to a Tree — not a tree of life but a tree of death

and he became for us not only a priest, but also a sacrifice.

He did this all so that he could be the New Adam – and provide us all with a new start in a new creation.

Where cherubim blocked the way to the First Temple with a flaming sword,

He now opens the way to the New Temple

with his welcoming and bleeding hands.

If what you are searching for,

is that joy beyond words

of delighting in God,

delighting in Creation,

delighting in each other,

know that there is only one way in.

His name is Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

PRAYER

Lord we dare to wait, to pray to dream,

That you are making us, bruised and battered though we be, into your holy people,

And that you are making this world, bruised and battered though it be, into our proper and eternal home.

Be near us, we pray,

until that day when heaven and earth become one again. Amen