Teaching Material.—Genesis 2:4-25.
Pupil’s Reading.—Genesis 2:9, 15-25.
Memory Text.—And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. Genesis 2:15.
LIGHT FROM OTHER BIBLE PASSAGES
Proverbs 14:23; 18:9; 22:29. Ecclesiastes 9:10; 11:6; Romans 12:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:11, 12.
FROM THE COMMENTATORS
Man is not made simply to enjoy life; he is to labor and work. Even such a garden as the one described in verse 9 gives scope for man’s activity; he is to till it, to develop its capacities, and adapt it to his own ends, and to keep (Isaiah 27:3) or guard it, against the natural tendency of a neglected garden to run wild, and against damage from wild animals or other possible harm.—The Book of Genesis, S. R. Driver.
But man is not designed solely to till and keep the garden. There are dormant in him capacities of moral and religious attainment, which must be exercised, developed, and tested. A command is therefore laid upon him, adapted to draw out his character, and to form a standard by which it may be tested. It is a short and simple command, unaccompanied even by a reason; but it is sufficient for the purpose: man’s full knowledge of what he must do or not do can be attained only as the result of a long moral and spiritual development, it cannot exist at the beginning. And the command relates to something to be avoided: the acknowledgment and observance of a limitation, imposed upon his creaturely freedom by his Creator and Lord, must be for man the starting point of everything else.—Die Genesis Erklärt, August Dillmann.
It is not enough to place man in the garden: further provision is yet required for the proper development of his nature, and satisfaction of its needs, a helper who may in various ways assist him, and who may at the same time prove a companion, able to interchange thought with him, and be in other respects his intellectual equal, is still needed.—The Book of Genesis, S. R. Driver.
In order to complete man’s happiness three primal laws were given. The first was work; this was embittered later in consequence of man’s sin, but is still his greatest blessing, whether he recognizes it as such or not. We find this to be true, for whenever man evades work, and seeks pleasure only, his whole nature becomes impoverished, and deprived of the stability of earnest purpose and responsibility which ought to be his birthright. The gift of law, even in its rudimentary stages “thou shalt not,” is the second great blessing to man. The moral law, putting man into the right relationship between good and evil, is as necessary as the great laws of the physical world are to the universe. Further, with the revelation of that law was given also the penalty of transgression. “In the day that thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt die.” “The wages of sin is death.”—Bible Lessons for Schools, Genesis, E. M. Knox.