Adam: Real Men Relate To God

When I told my wife we would be studying Adam and learning what it means to be a real man, she asked me, "What will the women in the church be doing?"

I didn’t have an answer for her, but I have an answer for all the women this morning. You’ve worked hard this week. You deserve to rest. For the next 30 minutes, you have my permission to dose off. You can plan out your afternoon or think about what to cook for dinner. There is absolutely nothing for you this morning.

I’m just kidding. Practically everything we will learn about men will apply to women. The Bible tells us that men and women are created equally but differently. An email I received compares men and women in this way:

"Women are compassionate, and loving, and caring. They will stop at nothing to get what they think is best for their children. They know how to comfort a sick friend. Women bring joy and laughter to the world. Women are easily brought to tears by injustice."

"Men, well, they are good at moving heavy things and killing spiders."

Our images of men, real men, have changed with time. There was time, when real men didn’t cry, or so we were encouraged to believe. Today, we are told that real men are sensitive, compassionate, in touch with their feelings and do cry.

The American cliché, "Real men don’t eat quiche," has been altered to "Real men not only eat quiche, but they also cook quiche."

But what does the Bible say about real men? After all, the Bible is God’s Word. The Creator ought to know what He created and what He intended His creation to be like.

For the next 30 minutes, I’m going to read portions of the creation account from the Bible. Then I will make two observations, one about the origin of man and the other about the image of man. After that, I will close with three ways real men relate to God.

Let me begin with the reading of Genesis 1:26-29; 2:7-9; 15-25, and then 3:1-12, 17-21.

If this account of creation is new to you, I encourage you to re-read these three chapters in Genesis. I imagine you have many questions. You’re welcome to email me with your questions, and I will reply after I come back from vacation.

For now, let me make the two observations related to Adam, the first man.

The first observation is that Adam, the first man, was created by God and not evolved from an ape or ape-like creature.

Some Christians want to believe the Bible and the theory of macro-evolution. (The Bible affirms micro-evolution, the differences – color, sizes, texture, etc.- within each type of animals caused by pressure from without or genetic changes from within.) So they blend the two together by saying God created the world and the basic elements, but God allowed evolution to be the process of creating higher beings, including human beings. Yet, the record in Genesis precludes macro-evolution.

Biochemist, Dr. Duane Gish, notes, "Evolution is the most wasteful, inefficient and cruel method that could ever be devised to create living things ... mutations (the process of evolution) leads almost always to bad outcomes: crippling, sickness, disfigurements and deaths. Good mutations are rare and they still need to compete with enormous odds to survive." A good and compassionate God would not use evolution as a process of creating living things.

Yet, in the United States, in Asia and in many other countries, people are taught the theory of evolution as fact. People are taught that men evolved from apes or ape-like creatures.

But if men truly evolved from apes and ape-like creatures, we should be able to find many fossils that have both ape-like and human-like features. The theory of evolution requires such transitional forms. Let’s take a look at what is found up to this point in time.

These are the popular fossil representatives we see in school textbooks, museums and zoos.

In 1860, during the lifetime of Charles Darwin, the fossil of a man who didn’t walk completely erect was found. This fossil was called the Neanderthal Man. Eventually, further analysis of certain Neanderthal Man showed the fossils were not from primitive ape-man, but possibly skeletons of modern men with signs of arthritis and rickets, a condition due to lack of vitamin D. Neanderthal Man was a man and not a transitional form.

In 1912, an ape-like jaw and a human skull were found close together, and scientists named this fossil the Piltdown Man. By 1950, scientists did more observation, and they found that the human skull and ape jawbone of the Piltdown Man were treated with chemical to look old. Furthermore, the teeth on the ape jawbone were mechanically filed to look like human teeth. Piltdown Man is not a transitional form.