Sound of Faith

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Greetings, friends and new listeners, and welcome to the Sound of Faith. I'm Sharon Knotts, thanking you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Today's message is part three of a three-part series on Genesis: The Recreation of Heaven and Earth. The newly refinished, beautified earth was ready for inhabitants—the birds and the bees, the animals and the beasts of the field. In His final masterstroke, the crown jewel of God's creation, made in His image and likeness. In part three of the Genesis series, we cover days five through seven.

So, God created man in His image and His likeness. His image and likeness. I looked at these words in many different places, trying to really get at the truth of what they mean. Everywhere that I studied, they mean the outward form and the outward appearance. That's what they mean: the outward form and the outward appearance. So, that means that whatever spiritual or celestial material God's body is made of, it looks like ours. We are made in the likeness and the similitude of the same outward image of God.

Let's go to Chapter 2, verse 7, and learn how He did it. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. This is one of my favorite verses in this whole account. The word "formed" is "yatsar" in Hebrew. It means to form or to fashion as a potter does clay or like a sculptor would. It means to mold, to squeeze, and to shape with your hands. This means that God got down in the dirt and sculpted Adam into a perfect human male body in the likeness and image of God.

But Adam was inanimate. He was lifeless. You can go to Europe and see some of the famous places in Rome where you can see the beautiful sculptures that Michelangelo sculpted. A famous one is the one of David. It is beautiful. You can see the shape of the arms and the muscles and everything, and admire its beauty and the artistry of the artist, but as beautiful as it is, it is lifeless. You can admire it, but it's lifeless.

When God leaned over this beautiful sculpture of this creature that He made in His own image and His own likeness, we read that He put His mouth on the nostrils. God got down and put His mouth on his nostrils and breathed into him the breath of life. In the Hebrew, the word life is "chayyim," and it's a plural word. He breathed into him the breath of lives. Man is the only one of God's creatures that received this double life, both physical and spiritual, because man has a soul and a spirit.

All other animals have souls. They have the capacity for emotions and the capacity for intelligence. I saw something the other day on Facebook of a dog—I forgot what kind of dog it was because you only saw the back of the dog—but he was watching television. They were playing that movie, The Lion King. There comes a scene when Mufasa the lion is killed, and the dog is watching this movie. When that lion is killed, the dog gets so upset. He gets upset, and it is like he is crying. You think that he understood what happened and he had empathy.

Animals have souls. They have emotions. Your animal will love you, be loyal to you, and show you affection. Some of them are very intelligent. They use them for police dogs; they use them to help people who have handicaps. They can help them navigate through life, turn on switches, and go get them their medicine. They are very intelligent. But what they don't have is a spiritual relationship with God.

We have a spiritual relationship with God because when God breathed into us, He breathed into us a part of Himself. I have a balloon here that I'm going to blow up. Now, this balloon contains my breath. I am pretty sure I can say this and it be true: it probably already has some of my spit in it, too. When you have to do a couple of breaths especially, you have to stop and blow. Some of your spittle goes in that balloon as well. You know that they can extract DNA from spit. When God created us, He put some of His DNA into Adam when He breathed into him.

We are the crown jewel of God's creation. Job 12:10 says, "In whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breath of all mankind." Did you catch that? Soul of every living thing, meaning every animal, and the breath of all mankind. Let me break it down for you. Soul is "nephesh" in Hebrew, and it simply means that which breathes. That which is a living creature breathing. But where it says breath, it is "ruach." Ruach sometimes is breath, sometimes it's wind, and sometimes it's spirit. The Holy Spirit is the "Ruach HaKodesh."

When we put it in context, He gave every living thing a soul, but He gave man a spirit. He gave us a spirit because we are made in His image and the animals are not. Ecclesiastes 3:20-21 says that all animals go unto one place. All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. That includes animals and humans. The body goes to dust. Remember God told Adam in Genesis 3:19 after they sinned, "For dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

What the wise man is saying here is that all mankind and all animals turn to dust. Verse 21 asks, "Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit or the breath of the beast that goes downward to the earth?" Do you understand that? When the animal dies, that's it. They're dead. They don't have a spirit to go to heaven. I'm sorry, but all dogs don't go to heaven. Animals' souls die with their bodies, but human spirits are eternal.

For the saved, we know 2 Corinthians 5:8 says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. At the moment that the spirit leaves the body of a born-again child of God, instantaneously, they are in the presence of the Lord. Some people wonder if they hover for a while. Not if they're dead. If they're dead, they go to be with the Lord.

We know there are people that have near-death experiences. I had one sort of similar to a near-death experience many years ago when I was pregnant with Todd. They were going to do an amniocentesis on me. They take this big needle, and they want to go into the amniotic fluid, which is the water that surrounds the baby. They want to extract some of the fluid, and they're able to tell by that if the baby's lungs are mature enough for the baby to be delivered, because I had to have a C-section. I was a couple of days before my due date.

It was supposed to be over within five minutes. We go in there, extract a little fluid, and that's it. Well, that's not how it went down with me. Instead of going into the amniotic fluid, they kept going into the placenta. When they realized what they had done, they did it again. They stuck me five times. My spirit left my body. I was in the ceiling looking down, and they were smacking my face, calling, "Sharon, Sharon!" They were saying her blood pressure's dropping. I was watching them, and I was thinking, "Why don't you just leave me alone?" I just wanted to be left alone.

But it was not my time to go, so I didn't die. It was not my time to go, so even though I had that experience where my spirit came out and was looking down, I wasn't in the presence of the Lord because I wasn't dead yet. The next thing I knew, they smacked me really hard and I came to. But the child of God whose spirit has left their body is immediately in the presence of the Lord. Unfortunately, those who do not know the Lord, their spirit goes to hell, waiting for the Great White Throne Judgment when they'll come before the Judge and then they'll be sentenced to the Lake of Fire.

Here is a part I really want you to see that is really interesting. We just read in 2:7 that God formed man out of the dirt, and we read in 2:19 that God formed the animals and the birds out of the dirt. In both places, it's the same Hebrew word: "yatsar." But there is a qualification that is very important. Where it says in 2:19 that God fashioned the birds and the animals, "yatsar" is spelled Y-A-T-S-A-R. But when we go to 2:7 where God formed man out of the dirt, the word "yatsar" is spelled Y-Y-T-S-A-R. It's spelled with two Ys, which is the Hebrew letter Yod.

The Rabbis believe that not only is the word of God inspired, they believe every letter of the Hebrew language is inspired. An extra Yod calls for understanding. If it's inspired, why is it there? There is no grammatical or linguistic reason to spell "yatsar" with two Yods, but there is a very important theological distinction being made. The letter Yod is a shortened form for God's name, Jehovah. That extra Yod stands for Jehovah.

So when Jehovah breathed into Adam the breath of lives, He breathed into him a part of Himself. My father has always gone by the name R. G. Hardy. Do you know what RG stands for? Robert George. But we don't call him Brother Robert George Hardy; we say Brother R. G. Hardy. But we know that RG stands for Robert George. They knew that the Yod stood for Jehovah. They knew that it stood for God, and putting that extra Yod in there was saying, "This is God's signature on His handiwork." This is God's signature on man, on human beings, that God has put a part of Himself in his DNA. He's breathed into him a living spirit that can have communication and fellowship with the Creator God. It's like His designer label, and only man has this distinction.

It is why we can speak, why we can talk, why we have language and animals don't. We read over and over again the last three weeks, "And God said," "And God called." Speech is the power to be able to declare one's thoughts and one's will. In this, we are like God and the animals are not. We have the ability to communicate with language what our thoughts are. We have the ability to communicate with language what our will and our desire is. When we say, "I will do this," it is the strongest declaration you can make. "I will" or "I will not do that." That's the strongest there is.

God gave us the ability to speak and to communicate. This is seen in the fact that we just read that God allowed Adam to name all the animals. He not only had great intelligence—which we don't possess the intelligence that he had because of the fall and because of sin—but we see spectacular brilliance every now and then pop up with someone like an Einstein. For the most part, we do not use all of our brain. What it's going to be like when we get our glorified body! I want the glorified body that doesn't hurt anymore, doesn't have achy joints and pain. But every once in a while, I think about what our mind is going to be like when it's restored to what it was for Adam. No wonder we're going to reign and rule with Christ. You have to be pretty smart to do that.

God is going to restore our brains. As you get older, you start slipping up here and there. You go into a room and don't know why you went in there. It happens. It really does happen. You have to scan for something that is going to jolt your memory and tell you why you came in here. Sometimes I ask for help and say, "Lord, please help me remember what it was I was supposed to be doing right now." But all of that is going to be restored and more because instead of using only a percentage, we're going to have 100%.

Let's take it one step higher. For born-again children of God, we not only have the ability that all humans have to speak, but we have the authority to speak God's word. We have the authority to speak God's word, and God's word is alive. God's word creates. Things happen when we speak God's word.

So now we've read how God created on day six. He created all the animals and man. We learned they both came from the dirt. But we have to find out how God created Eve. We go to Chapter 2, verse 21: "And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam 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.' Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed because they were sinless."

So God put Adam to sleep, opened up his side, and took out his rib, closed him up, and from that He fashioned a woman. Where it says, "And the rib which God had taken from man, made He a woman," the word "made" in Hebrew is "banah." Three hundred and fifty-four times that it is used in the Old Testament, it is translated as "built." He built a woman. When I was young, they used to say when a woman had a nice figure, they'd say, "She's really built." Well, it's biblical because God built Eve.

When God created man, He created him and gave him an occupation. He is created to do work. Men are created to work. It says in Chapter 2, verse 5, that there was no man to till the ground. Look at verse 15: "And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." Man was created to work. Woman was created for relationship. Look at 2:18: "And the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make for him a help meet for him.'"

When you put the two together, they reflect God's nature. God acted; He created man. What was His purpose? Fellowship. That's why He created us in His image and His likeness. In Chapter 3, we are told that God would come down in the garden in the cool of the day and He would spend time in fellowship with Adam and Eve. When we take man who's got a drive in him to work, and woman who's wired for relationship, and you put the two together, then you have the very nature of God.

God is a worker. He worked six days and He created beautiful things and He said, "And it is good." But God did it for a reason. He wanted fellowship, apparently different fellowship than He had with the angels. He wanted fellowship with us. That's why He made us in His likeness, in His image, and gave us the ability to have deep call unto deep, spirit unto spirit.

We read in verse 24, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave unto his wife; and they two shall be one flesh." Now think about this: Adam had no mother or father. So what does this mean? It's setting down for all of time the divine design for marriage. The divine design for marriage. This verse was cited by Jesus in Matthew 19 and by Paul in Ephesians 5. The word "cleave" means to be glued to. To be glued to something. If you have ever taken superglue and you have glued two things together and then thought, "Oh, I didn't want to glue that together; let me take it apart and try again," what happens? You damage both parts. That's what happens when there's divorce. It damages both parts. So be a cleaver, not a leaver.

Let's look at verse 28 in Chapter 1: "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 moves upon the earth.' And God said, 'Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.'" That word there means food because obviously trees don't produce meat. "And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so. And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."

We see here in verses 29 through 31 that God gave man and all the animals a vegetarian diet. The birds were vegetarians. All the beasts were vegetarians. Leo the Lion was a vegetarian. That's what it says. Isn't that what it said? "And all of the beasts and everything that creeps on the earth, I've given you the herb-yielding seed for your food." This is one reason why when God told Noah to take two of every animal and put them in the ark and they were going to be in there for a long time, they didn't eat each other and they didn't eat Noah, because they weren't meat-eaters. They were vegetarians.

It was after the flood, when Noah and all his family and animals came out of the ark, then God said, "Now you can eat meat." God knew that the earth, the ground, the soil had lost much of its nutrients because of the flood, and they were not going to get enough of what they needed just eating plants. The soil was cursed. When Adam sinned, it was cursed. When Cain sinned, it was cursed. Now we've got the third time it's cursed. So it did not have the nutrients that it should have, and that's why God said, "You can now eat meat."

Another thing that God said after He brought Noah and the animals out of the ark, He said in Genesis 9:2, "The fear of dread of man will now be on every beast and bird." That's a second reason why He was able to get all those animals in the ark without a problem: they weren't meat-eaters and they weren't afraid. They weren't afraid of man. When Noah would call them, they just came. Now animals have the dread of man on them. They want to be away from man, unless they've been domesticated like cattle and sheep and dogs and cats. They want to be away from man. But if a man comes in their territory and they're hungry, they're going to eat him.

Those people that say, "I don't believe Noah's ark story because all those animals would have eaten each other," they don't know the Bible. They say that and it's foolish because they don't know the whole story. They don't know what God said. They weren't meat-eaters and they weren't afraid until afterwards. So God blessed them. He told them to be fruitful and multiply and to subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and over every living thing. This was both of them. This was Adam and Eve that He gave dominion and told them to have dominion and to subject all of creation under them. God saw not only that it was good, but that it was very good. It was very good.

If you've been following us in this comprehensive study of the Genesis series, The Recreation of Heaven and Earth, we have come to days five through seven when God created wonderful inhabitants to dwell on the newly restored, beautified earth. God formed the birds and the beasts of the field. Then, His final masterpiece, the crown jewel of His creation, God created humans in His own image and likeness. All were formed from the dust of the earth, but only man received the breath of God into his nostrils, creating him not only a soul but also a spirit. Only humans have the ability to communicate spirit-to-spirit with God.

Find out the exciting way God put His signature on Adam that can only be seen in the spelling of the Hebrew word for formed and why it begins with two Yods. To hear this complete teaching, order the three-CD set of Genesis: The Recreation of Heaven and Earth. You will receive part one, Recreation of Heaven and Earth; part two, Recreation Days Two through Four; and part three, Recreation Days Five through Seven. Send your memorial gift of $20 to Sound of Faith, PO Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203. Request offer SK777, or go to our e-store at soundoffaith.org where MP3s are also available. To order the Genesis series, the complete three-CD teaching, by mail, send your love gift of $20 or more to PO Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203, request SK777.

Until next time, this is Sharon Knotts saying, Maranatha.