Second Stage Ministries

After God had created the world and gave Adam his instructions, God said: “'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'" - Genesis 2:18 NIV God knew right from the start that man should not be alone. He knew from the start that man could not do life alone. We need people to interact with and to do this thing called life, and when that element is missing or infrequent - loneliness can come aboard and start whispering all kinds of things to us, making us feel worse, and that is not the way God wants it. But we also find something else out right from the very beginning. After Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which we will look at in the next post) and they were hiding from God, we see these words in Genesis 3: “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was  walking in the garden  in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the

Over the last couple of posts, we have seen the world take shape with the voice of God. We have seen how God shaped us with His two hands. We have also looked at God's view of rest.  Today we are going to take an imaginative look at the paradise that God had created for Adam and Eve to live in. It must have been quite an amazing place to be in, and it was all for them and the animals. I can imagine that it must have been a place of pure awe. The trees and plants along the banks of the river (Genesis 2:10). The animals playing in the fields and water. The sunrises and sunsets. The endless supply of food from the trees and plants. Then the only thing Adam and Eve had to do was enjoy the space that God had made for them. God did, however, give them some responsibilities in the Garden.  1 - Work and care for the Garden     "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." - Genesis 2:15 NIV But I believe that th

The Dawn - part 3 - God Rested As we continue our look at the book of Genesis, we are going to be looking at the last day of Creation in this post. We can find the last day of Creation in Genesis 2: “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.” - Genesis 2:2 NIV Now I always ask this question whenever I reference this day of Creation - Did God really need to rest? Did He fall down in His lazy boy and exhausted from all the work? No. Of course not! However, He did know a little bit about us. So by "resting" on the seventh day, God is showing us a rhythm. A rhythm of work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. Work, work, work, work, work, work, rest. God wants us to rest. Rest is good for the soul. Rest is good, period. But we have been conditioned to think that rest is lazy and unproductive. We say to ourselves - "Here I am sitting here when I could be doing something.&quo

In the last post we talked about how God spoke and the world was created. We can see this in Genesis 1. But towards the end of Genesis 1 we see the Creation story take a turn to a different type of creating. God went from speaking things in to existence to forming us in to existence. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” - Genesis 1:27 NIV “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” - Genesis 2:7 NIV These verses put a whole new look on the creation story. For the longest time I thought Genesis 2 was the next part of the story. But really Genesis 2 zooms in on how God created us and how the Garden of Eden became Adam and Eve's home. Can you picture this? God creating Adam from the dust of the ground and if He created Adam that way that mean He created all of us that way! God formed