Genesis 2

Genesis 2:6

Mist There went up a mist from the earth.—Genesis 2:6.If you searched the world to find people who really and truly like mist I expect you would discover very few. You would not find many even in Scotland, where they have plenty of misty rain. Yes, few of us like mist. It hides the world from us; it makes us feel choky and damp and depressed. We seldom see a boy or a girl dancing and skipping down the road on a misty day as they do on a sunny one. Even the birds seem less lively.Did you ever wonder what mist is and how it is formed? Well, mist is just water—tiny drops of water. The sun draws up the moisture from the earth and the sea and the rivers.

It draws it up in the form of water vapor, which is really a transparent gas and so invisible to us. But when the air gets cooler, as at sunset, the water vapor turns into mist much in the same way as the water vapor that comes out of a boiling kettle turns into steam when it strikes the cooler air of a room. Sometimes this mist stays above us in the form of clouds, sometimes it comes down to earth.Now we haven’t lived very many years in the world before we find that there are mists in life as well as in nature. There are sunny days when everything seems to go right, and there are misty days when everything seems to go wrong. There are things that are hard to bear or difficult to accomplish, and we don’t see the use of them. There are troubles that seem to surround us on every side like a mist.

We cannot see through them, and we begin to wonder if there is any way out. I want to speak to you about some of these mists today.1.

First there are the little mists we can rise above. These are the small frets and worries and annoyances of everyday life. A great deal of time and energy is wasted in turning these slight mists into impenetrable fogs. If you have to learn a difficult lesson, any amount of wishing you hadn’t to won’t help you. If you have to go to the dentist, well, you just have to, and worrying about it beforehand won’t make it any nicer. If you have broken a favorite toy or lost a favorite knife, fretting and regretting won’t mend matters. If someone has spoken a cross word to you, that is no reason why you should break your heart. They are most likely suffering from indigestion.

Just be nice to them and see what happens.In the midst of a great political crisis Mr. Gladstone was once asked by a friend, “Don’t you find you lie awake at night, thinking how you ought to act, and how you ought to have acted?” And Mr. Gladstone replied, “No, I don’t. What would be the use of that?”If we could just make ourselves think like that, then we could rise above these annoying little mists of everyday life.A lady once went travelling in Switzerland. She lived mostly in the towns and villages, but one night she slept in a chalet half-way up a mountain. When she wakened in the morning she found herself in a wonderful world.

Above was the beautiful blue sky, all round was the morning sunlight, but beneath was a thick carpet of mist. It filled all the valley and shut away entirely the villages below.

She felt as if she were in a world of her own, up there with the blue sky and the sunlight and the snow-capped mountains.And, boys and girls, that is the best way to deal with our small worries. If we can get up into the sunshine, if we can learn to look on the bright side of things, then we shall find that all these little disagreeable mists are in their right place—beneath our feet!2. And then there are the mists that make things beautiful, the bigger mists of real trouble and hardship and difficulty. They don’t seem beautiful at the time, these mists, but they leave a rare beauty behind them.Have you ever looked round you, when the sun came out after a thick mist? The world was turned into a wonderful fairy palace. Each blade of grass carried a diamond, and the spiders’ webs sparkled with jewels of many colors. And “Old Man Mist” had done it all with his magic wand.When the roses droop and the daisies swoonFor song of the summer rain,His presence comes as a gracious boonO’er valley and field and plain;Whenever the folds of his tent swing wide,At eve or the grey of morn,The hills are glad and the mountainside,The meadows and fields of corn.Full softly he comes with stores untoldAnd scatters his treasure rare—Life for the blooms of crimson and gold,And jewels beyond compare;But hidden always from blaze of light His wonderful deeds are done,Under the cloud and out of the sight Of the fervid glow of the sun! (B. F. Leggett, “Old Man Mist.”)And it is the same with the mists of life—they make things beautiful. They grow beautiful characters. It is generally the men and women who have had to fight against the greatest difficulty who have made the biggest and noblest name for themselves in the world; and a good old man once said that the things he could spare least from his life were the things that at the time he found hardest to bear.Once two friends were discussing the difficulty they had in growing, in their English gardens, some wild blue gentians that they had brought from Switzerland. The first man told how he had tried over and over again and had always failed.

Then the other man related how he also had tried repeatedly to grow the flowers in good positions and had always failed. “But one day,” he said, “I planted a root and made a gravel path right over it. And—would you believe it?—it grew and flourished!”Boys and girls, the fairest flowers of character grow and flourish under difficulty and hardship.

So don’t lose heart if the big mists of trouble come down upon you. Remember there is beauty beyond the mist.3. Lastly there are the thick impenetrable mists which God alone can clear away.God hangs a mist between us and the future, but He does it in mercy. If we saw our whole path in life our hearts might fail, but God gives us just one day at a time. The rest He hides in mist.And God sometimes hangs a mist between us and the things that happen to us here below. We cannot understand many of them now, but some day He will clear away the mist and then all will become plain.A good old man, one of the Principals of St.

Andrews University, lay dying. He was looking out on a Highland loch where lay a thick mist, and this is what he said, “It is very misty now, but it will soon be perfectly clear.”It is often misty now, boys and girls, but it will be perfectly clear in the morning when the sunshine of God’s presence will dispel all the mists of earth.

Genesis 2:8

The Garden Of The Soul A garden.—Genesis 2:8.Do you remember how we heard about the four gardens of the Bible and how we discovered that we have each been given a garden to keep—the garden of the soul? Today we are going to find out how to keep our soul-gardens.Now you know there are all sorts of gardens. Some of them look very untidy and neglected; others are neat and well cared for. You can generally tell what kind of people live in a house by looking at their garden. We don’t want our soul-gardens to grow untidy and ugly, do we? We want them to grow more and more beautiful. But if they are to be beautiful we must take some trouble with them, because gardens don’t take care of themselves. And so I think the first thing we must do is to make sure that they are well enclosed.

1. Why do people build a wall or fence around a garden? To protect it, and to keep out anything that would harm it. Of course we have no wild beasts in this country, but we sometimes hear of rabbits or deer getting into gardens and doing a lot of damage by nibbling the young green things. Once two cows got into a lady’s garden by mistake. Somebody had left the gate open, and the cows walked in and trampled on her beautiful flowerbeds, and left their hoof-marks on her lawn.So we must build a wall of defense round our soul-gardens to protect them against the wild beasts of temptation from without.

The best defense we can build is the defense of prayer.2. But, besides being well enclosed, a garden must be cultivated.If gardeners let their plants and trees grow anyhow, if they allow the weeds to flourish, their gardens soon become a wilderness.

They must prune the trees so that they bear more fruit; they must tend the delicate plants with care and pull up the weeds.And so it is with our soul-gardens. We must pull up the weeds of sin and bad habits—the weeds of laziness, and selfishness, and untruthfulness, and ill-temper—else they will soon overrun the place and spoil it. And we must cultivate the good things—the flowers of unselfishness, and kindness, and love.But don’t get discouraged if you don’t succeed all in a day. This is work which requires a great deal of patience.There was once a little girl who went to spend Easter at North Berwick on the east coast of Scotland. She was very fond of climbing North Berwick Law—a hill close to the town. When she went home again she sowed some flower seeds in her garden.

But after a week or two she grew tired of waiting for the seeds to come up; so she dug up her garden and built North Berwick Law in the middle of it. She was very sorry when a week or two later her sister’s seeds came up, and she had none.So don’t get tired if the flowers in your soul-garden take long to grow.

Don’t lose patience and dig them up, for they are sure to flourish some day if you tend them carefully.3. Lastly, a garden must he well watered.Sometimes after a long dry spell in summer you have seen the flowers drooping their heads and looking very weary. What do they need to revive them? A good shower of rain.And our soul-gardens need rain too, the refreshing rain of God’s Spirit. We must ask God to give us His Holy Spirit in order that our gardens may be kept fresh and beautiful, in order that they may be made fit for His fair Garden of Paradise.

Genesis 2:12

The Onyx Stone The onyx stone.—Genesis 2:12.How many precious stones do you know? Count and see. I expect all of you know a diamond and a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire, an amethyst and a turquoise. That makes six. How many precious stones do you think the Bible knows? Nineteen! And if we add what we may call “the precious stones of the sea,” the pearl and the coral, that makes the list total twenty-one.You will find most of these precious stones in three great lists. The first list is in the twenty-eighth chapter of the book of Exodus, and it is repeated in the thirty-ninth chapter.

That list is a description of the twelve jewels which Aaron, the first Jewish high priest, wore on his breastplate. There were four rows of stones, three in each row, and each stone had the name of a tribe engraved on it. When Aaron went into the Holy Place to intercede with God for the people he put on this wonderful breastplate. He carried, as it were, the names of the tribes on his heart when he entered the presence of God. And as the light of the Holy Place fell on the twelve jewels they flashed and glowed as if they were living.The second list you will find in the twenty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel; the stones mentioned there are those worn by the King of Tyre. There are nine of them, and you will notice that they are all stones that were mentioned in the first list, though the order is different.

Between the time of the first list and the second nine hundred years had passed. Seven hundred years after the second list a third list appeared.

You will find it in the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. The stones spoken of there are the twelve foundation- stones of the New Jerusalem, the City of God which is to be, and which John the Apostle saw in a vision. If you read over that list you will notice that eight of the stones we have already met, and four are strangers. The four new stones have names which look hard to spell and difficult to pronounce. Try them. Chalcedony, Sardonyx, Chrysolite, Chrysoprase.Besides these three lists you will find the names of jewels scattered through many pages of the Bible.

You see, the Jews were an Eastern people, and Eastern nations set greater store by gems than we do. You have only to look at the picture of an Indian Prince with his magnificent strings of pearls and his jeweled sword and his turban clasped with an enormous emerald—you have only to look at him to see how much jewels mean to those in the East.

An Eastern counts them his most cherished possession. Instead of putting his money in the Bank he buys jewels. He thinks of them as living. He believes that they bring to their wearer health, wealth, happiness, strength, long life, and fame. He fondly hopes that they will keep away from him evil and misfortune. He even imagines that they will wash away sin.We don’t go so far as our Eastern brothers, but still we too love jewels. We admire their wonderful color and their fascinating sparkle, and we like to hear the many stories that are told of them. Let us see if they have any special message to give to us.We are not going to take any of the lists we have mentioned, but we are going to make up a list of our own—a stone for each month.

Perhaps you may have heard people talking about their birth-stone. They were going back to an idea which the old Romans had that every month of the year had its own precious stone. The Romans said that if you were born in a certain month you should wear the stone belonging to that month. It would bring you good luck. They also wore a talisman made of the stones of the months set in their proper order. Of course we are too sensible to think that merely wearing certain stones will bring us good fortune, but let us see if we cannot make a talisman of our own out of twelve of the Bible stones.Our stone for January will not be the garnet, which is the stone the Romans chose for it, but the very first precious stone mentioned in the Bible.

Look up the second chapter of Genesis. In the last three words of the twelfth verse you will find our text—“the onyx stone.”How many of you know an onyx stone when you see it?

And how many of you can tell me why it was called an onyx? Some of the bigger boys and girls who are learning Greek will be able to help here. They will tell us that the onyx stone is named after the finger-nail. There is a whitish half moon at the base of your finger-nail, then there is a broad band of pink, and then there is, or should be, another narrow strip of white. The onyx is a banded stone, and the Greeks thought the markings on it resembled those on the human nail, so they called it the “finger-nail” stone. The best known onyx is formed of layers of black and white, but there are onyxes of other shades besides.

Many of them have a layer of red, and these are known as sardonyxes.You must have seen an onyx many a time though you may not have recognized it. Perhaps Granny has a brooch with a beautiful head carved in white against a black background.

You have often looked at it and wondered if the jeweler glued the white carving on to the black foundation. Well, no jeweler ever glued the one to the other, the two are just one stone, and it was God who made them one ages and ages ago. That stone was once a round lump in the hollow of a volcanic rock, and somebody found it and took it to the jeweler, and he cut it, oh so carefully; and then he carved out of the white layer that tiny delicate head; and the result was Granny’s brooch which she calls her “cameo.” That is the name given to the figure cut on the stone.Nowadays we do not admire the onyx so tremendously.Other jewels are more fashionable. But in olden times and in Bible days the onyx was highly prized. It was found in large pieces, so large that even cups have been cut out of a single block. It was tough, yet not too hard, and so lent itself to the engraver’s tools.Its colored layers allowed him to get a striking effect.I wonder what the onyx stone has to say to us.

If it could speak I think it would like to tell us to be sure to get ourselves well engraved. It would say, “Boys and girls, try to be beautiful like me.

You are like the lump of stone when it comes from the rock. You can be made into almost anything. It all depends on how you are cut. Are you going to let yourself be spoiled by bad cutting? Are you going to let time and chance have their way and engrave on you images faulty, or distorted, or hideous? Or do you wish to be a beautiful gem, fit for a king’s wear? Then go to Christ, the best Engraver, and ask Him to take you in hand. Ask Him to do the cutting and the polishing.

Ask Him to take you and make of you what He will.”Shall I tell you the result? Christ will grave on you His own pure image, and He will make of you a gem worthy to be worn in His own crown. [The texts of the other sermons in this series are Job 28:19; Proverbs 3:15; Jeremiah 17:1; Ezekiel 1:26; Ezekiel 27:16 (2), Ezekiel 28:13; Matthew 13:45; Revelation 21:19-20 (2)]