He Provides

The Garden Was Planted for the Man

Everything else was made out there. The light, the waters, the dry land, the grass, the lights in the firmament, the fish, the fowl, the cattle. All of it made across the face of the whole earth. Then God planted a garden.

One place. A special place, set apart from everything else He had made, and He put the man in it.

So I read that garden as planted for him. Genesis does not stop and say who else it was or was not for, so that part is mine.

Verse 7 formed the man out of the ground. Verse 8 plants the garden and puts him there.

And verse 8 puts the planting before the putting, so the place was there to be put into.

The Two Words

Eden. Now men who read the Hebrew do not all agree on this one. Some take it from a word meaning delight or pleasure. Some take it from an older word meaning a plain, open country. I take the first, and here is why, because the word turns up as pleasure elsewhere in Scripture.

That word pleasures is from the Hebrew word family I am taking Eden with.

Garden is gan. The lexicons give the word associations with enclosure, and I am using that association as a picture rather than saying Genesis describes a wall or a fence around Eden.

So put the two thoughts together, and understand that the putting together is mine.

He did not set the man down in the open field with the whole earth to fend in. He made him a place, and the word for that place carries an enclosing in it. Safe is my word for what that enclosing was for, and Genesis does not say. But the picture I get from those two words is a delight with an enclosing about it, rather than a wide open world. That picture is mine.

He Does Not Leave Us as Orphans

That is who He is, and I read Him as not having changed. And the verse I am about to give you is not about Eden. Jesus is in an upper room with His disciples, telling them the Comforter is coming. I am the one holding the two together, because I hear the same care in both.

Same care, both ends of the Bible, and He does not bring a life into the world and walk off from it.

He Did Not Plant It

And let me be careful with the order, because the verses do not lay it out as neatly as I want. Verse 8 plants the garden and puts the man in it. Verse 9 then tells me God made the trees grow. Which came first, the verses do not settle.

What I take from it is this. Verse 8 says planted, and then says put. So the garden was a garden before the man was set down in it. And verse 9 says the trees were good for food. Whether they were bearing the day he arrived, or how old they were, Genesis does not tell me. What it does tell me is that they were food trees and he did not plant them.

He did not hand Adam a bag of seed and put him in a bare field. He put him in a garden, with trees in it that were good for food, and the man had not lifted a finger toward any of them.

The verse names two things about those trees. Pleasant to the sight, and good for food.

So they were not only useful, some of them were beautiful, and God counted that worth mentioning. He fed the man and He gave him something to look at. Those are the two things the verse names, and I will not add a third. He was not given the bare minimum to survive on.

Two trees are named as well. The verse puts the tree of life in the midst, and then names the tree of the knowledge of good and evil without telling me where it stood. And I am going to leave them both where they stand. I have worked the two of them out in Which Window Are We Looking Out Of, because they belong to another chapter.

He Did Not Leave It to Dry

He did not plant a garden and leave it to dry.

A river went out and watered it, and it parted and ran four ways. Those four are named, and men have spent a long time trying to find them on a map, and that is not what we are here for. What matters is what the water tells you about Him.

The water was running through that garden, and the man did not cut the channel.

Planted, watered, enclosed. And a man standing in the middle of it who did none of it.

When God Calls Us He Equips Us

Nothing in that garden was waiting on the man to produce it. He was put into a garden. He did not plant one. Whatever order the making went in, and I have already said the verses do not settle it, he arrived at a place that was already called a garden, with trees in it he did not grow and a river he did not dig.

And here is a thing I hold, and I will name it as mine, the same way I named it in the study on Genesis 1:28. Genesis does not lay it down as a rule anywhere.

When He calls us, He equips us, and He does not send us out and hope we manage. He had a garden ready for a man who never made one, and that is how I have come to expect Him. But we do not always see it.

Moses stood at a burning bush being given what he needed for what God was calling him to do, and still spent that conversation raising what he saw as reasons he could not do it. And it was not the stammer yet. That comes later in the chapter.

Nobody will believe me. That was the objection, and God answered it with a question.

And he said, “A rod.” He was holding it.

He was standing there telling God they might not believe him, and the answer God gave began with something already in his hand.

So the question is not whether God has provided, for verse 8 says planted, and then says put. The question is whether we are standing in the middle of the provision arguing about what we think we are missing. That is the whole of these three verses.

He Provides

He made what I am reading as a delight, and I see an enclosing in the word for the place He made. He grew the trees. He set the river running. He brought the man in and put him in the middle of it, and the man had not done one thing toward any of it. What God then said he could eat, and the one thing He held back, is the next verse and a study of its own. He provides, and He does not leave us as orphans.