One of my earliest childhood memories, if not the earliest, is when my brother Richard (who I called ‘Pim’) was just old enough to pull himself up on furniture. He wasn’t yet walking. I would put him at about 9 months, meaning I must have been just over three years old. We used to share a bedroom and one night, probably at about two in the morning, I had the idea of going into the bathroom, filling up a bucket of water and tipping it on my brother while he slept in his cot. To this day, I have no idea what made me do it. Was it a kind of scientific experiment? Was it spite? I don’t know. It just seemed a good idea at the time.
I went into the bathroom, filled up the bucket my mum used to mop the floor, carried it into the bedroom and happily anointed Richard with cold tap water in mid slumber. Unsurprisingly, he woke up immediately and, to my great alarm, started to protest loudly. This was going to alert my mum and dad. Things were therefore not quite going to plan. Guessing that they would identify me as the culprit, I hid under the cot and waited. When they arrived, they found Richard standing up, holding the bars of his cot and blinking water out of his cute little eyes in a state of understandable shock. My dad pulled me out from under the cot, which was in hindsight a pathetic hideaway, and said, “What’s going on?” I can remember my reply as if it was yesterday. I looked at Richard and I looked at my dad and said, “Pim wet himself!”
How I avoided getting the family nickname ‘John the Baptist’, I will never know. But it’s interesting to me that one of my earliest memories has to do with offence and guilt and hiding and blame. Because one of the most primitive collective memories of human existence is a narrative centred on exactly those themes (offence, guilt, hiding and blame) but unlike my childhood prank, this one is deadly serious. It’s the story of the first couple falling from grace and being driven out of Eden. It’s the story of one choice that led to losing everything.
Had they not fallen away from God into sin, Adam and Eve would have remained in their beautiful, innocent state and spiritual death would never have entered the world. It is difficult to imagine what human nature was like then by viewing it as it is now. The 20th Century pastor and theologian David Breese says, “It would require something like trying to reconstruct the original version of an aircraft from its wreckage. If we knew nothing of flying, we would hardly suspect that it had once soared above the earth. The material would be the same; the capability of flight, however, would be lost.”
Genesis 3 is a fascinating autopsy of temptation and sin; it’s like one of those cutaway-working models you see in a science museum, you get to see how it all works. But it is also, if you like, an archetype of all wrongdoing. The essence of all sin is displayed in this first sin. In other words, this is a fatal pattern that repeats itself in our lives every day. That means by understanding what’s going on in Genesis 3 this you can gain wisdom and become better prepared to defeat sin in your life. We’re going to look this morning at two things; firstly the mechanism of sin; what it is and how it operates – and secondly, the consequences of sin; where it leads. If we know where it leads to we can find the way back to our starting point of peace with God.
1) The Mechanism of Sin
a) Doubting God’s word - Did God really say? (v1)
The first thing to understand is how sin starts when we distrust God and what he says. In Genesis 3.1; the devil comes to the woman in the form of a snake and asks, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” He is raising suspicions about God’s word. “Wait a minute. Did God really say that? Positive? Would you bet your life savings on that? I don’t you’re really sure are you?”
“If you were a true Christian, you wouldn’t be so sceptical, would you?” Or, “No way would a real Christian ever do what you’ve just done, would they!” If he can get us to doubt whether we are Christians, then we are much more vulnerable because once he has got us doubting that we’re good enough to belong to God he starts to say, “Well now, since you are probably not a Christian anyway, it doesn’t really matter - go ahead.” It all starts by raising doubts about God’s word.
This is his strategy in Genesis. When you look back into the last chapter of Genesis, you can see how psychologically manipulative the devil is. Verse 16: “The Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden.’” Look what it’s saying here: God gives to the man an amazing breadth of freedom and almost unlimited permission. He says, “You are free to eat from anything in the garden.” Ladies and gentlemen: the remarkable and permissive generosity of God. That’s the basic truth. “You are free to eat from anything in the garden.” Almost. There is, in fact, one (and only one) minor prohibition. “But,” says God, (v17) “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Just one tree, that’s all. And then, God gives a clear warning about the major consequences of any defiance. “For if you do eat of it, you will surely die.”
Now watch carefully the way the devil works here. It’s revealing. He comes to the woman saying, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” Hold on! That is a leading question. That is not what God said at all. There is a deliberate misquotation hidden in that question. God grants extensive freedoms. But the devil ignores that. He concentrates instead on God’s single prohibition, which he shamelessly exaggerates. God’s “no” was limited to only one tree, but the devil asks, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” Any tree?
You see how this works? Now, that is exactly the sly way he operates today. The enemy of your soul always ignores God’s ‘yes.’ He never points out the wonderful things God has given us to enjoy. God is an open-handed, loving, fantastic, amazing God. He’s given us the joy of walking in a relationship with him, of being sons and daughters of God. He’s given us all the riches of Christian relationships, a level of friendship that we never experience anywhere else, the blessing of a Christian home, all kinds of marvellous, guilt-free pleasures, food and drink, all creation to behold and enjoy - and Satan calculatingly, cunningly, ignores all of it.
The devil, for example, never says to a new believer in Christ, “Do you realise what fun all those Christians have? They have an amazing time, do you realise how good God is to them?” He overlooks that! With Adam and Eve he ignores God’s ‘yes’ and he exaggerates God’s ‘no.’ That is what he still does. “Do you realise the sad life you’ll live if you become a Christian?” he says. “You won’t be able to take drugs. Or get drunk. Or sleep around. Or cheat on your taxes; you’ll be poor. What a drag. You don’t want a lifetime of cheerless drudgery do you? Decades lamenting all these great things you can’t do...”
b) Disbelieving God’s word - You will not surely die! (v4)
Having sown doubt and suspicion and scepticism about what God’s word, the devil goes one step further; he flatly rubbishes it. “You don’t want to believe the Bible, do you? It’s just myths and old wives’ tales,” he says. “Surely die? Is that what he said?” So he denies that there is any penalty for disobeying God. “Oh, we all go to heaven in the end,” he says, “you don’t want to believe in hell, come on!”
So the woman says in v3, “No, we may eat from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the one tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” It sounds spot on. She’s standing firm. What a good answer. Right? Wrong! She has already, in fact, begun to fall into the trap. When did God ever say anything about touching the tree in chapter 2? He said, “Don’t eat the fruit.” That’s all. But Eve is convinced she heard it. Or, wait a minute. Did he mention about touching the tree as well? Maybe he didn’t… What did he say now? She’s not sure. Then watch what the devil does: seeing she has started to get confused, he comes across as decisive and assured. “Surely die? No, you won’t...” In other words, the devil says, “Come on, it won’t do you any harm. Go on! Try it.”
c) Disobeying God’s word - They ate… (v6)
The next verse is like a sugar trap for wasps. “The serpent says to the woman, “God knows that when (not if, notice) when you eat it your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” “It’ll be amazing,” he’s saying. Wow, how good does that sound...? “So,” v6, “she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, (and had been listening all the time and just stood there saying nothing) and he ate it.” Game, set and match.
2) The Consequences of Sin
a) Awareness of guilt - They covered and hid themselves (v8)
Now what? Did they get that mind-blowing, eye-opening, amazing experience the snake promised? It’s the ultimate high! You’re going to be like God! Verse 7 says they realised they were naked in public, became embarrassed, and sewed fig leaves together to make coverings for themselves.”
Picture the garden now; Adam sitting down doing nothing and Eve rushing around with a garden rake, saying, “Adam, why don’t you clear up your own underwear!”
If you’ll excuse the play on words, it’s revealing how often people try to conceal the evidence when they make mistakes. Cover ups didn’t begin at Watergate, they started in the Garden of Eden. And the man and woman covered up because they were uncomfortable, they were ashamed. Mark Twain said “Human beings are the only animals that blush, and they’re the only ones that need to.”
Sandra Newman talks about the time they she checked out of a hotel with her family. “As we were leaving the lobby of the hotel” she says, “Our three-year-old son looked down at the doormat with the hotel logo on it. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “That’s on our towels at home!” Don’t you just love kids?
Embarrassment: If you could project on the screen behind me a list of all the things I’ve ever done wrong in my life, all the things that I’ve said, all the things that I’ve thought, I would be deeply embarrassed and humiliated. Even among the upright people of All Saints’ Preston on Tees, I am certain there would be no volunteers for that. We all cover up what we don’t want others to know about us.
Verse 8 tells us, “They hid” - they were cringing, because when God says to them, “Where are you?” the man says, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid.” So the man and the woman were cut off from each other and something has gone wrong in their relationship with God too. Suddenly there’s fear and anxiety in there. Satan’s goal is to cut us off from fellowship with God, and here now the man is frightened - that was never the intention when God created human beings.
Have you noticed how scared people can be about church? It can be an intimidating experience if you’re not used to it because you don’t know what to expect. In old churches you sometimes see people behind the pillars. There’s a sort of feeling that God can’t really see behind the pillars, and it might be safer there. Thing is, we haven’t got any in this church, so it’s petrifying for visitors; there’s nowhere to hide! The man and the woman were afraid and they were cut off from God and that’s so often where we end up after falling into sin, feeling detached, wretched, cheapened by it all. “Where are you?” calls God. Where indeed…
b) Immediate human conflict - The woman that you gave me… (v12-13)
After embarrassment; blame. When people turn away from God, they usually start fighting each other. If you’ve ever witnessed a car crash, you will have been struck by the way the drivers get out of their cars and say, “I am terribly sorry that was just so my fault. Will you forgive me?” Not. In reality, people start making excuses; they blame one another and try to clear themselves of any responsibility.
Here are some statements people have allegedly written on their accident claim forms that they have sent off to their insurance company. One man wrote this: “Going home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree that wasn’t there.” Another wrote: “The other car collided with mine without giving warning of his intention!” A third put this: “The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him!” Or “The pedestrian had no idea which way to go, so I ran him over.” We are seasoned experts at making excuses and we all know that when we’re in the wrong we hate admitting it.
With Adam and Eve it’s exactly the same. Embarrassment leads to excuses. The man says to God, “I was scared because I was naked; so I hid.” And God says, “Oh? Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from that tree that I told you not to?” And what does this strong man do? He blames her. “The woman you put here - she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” And what does the woman do? She blames the snake. “It was the snake.” So the man blamed the woman; the woman blamed the serpent, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on…
Why do we, as a race, find it so hard to admit that we are amiss? The words that I find hardest to say are probably, “I was wrong.” Making excuses or blaming someone else are at the heart of pretty well all major international rows, every industrial dispute, most office conflicts and are the daily diet of every divorce proceeding and criminal trial.
c) Separation from God – Cursed and banished from Eden (v14-23)
Well, it all ends in tears. And that was the devil’s plan, right from the very beginning. Satan is a deceiver, a destroyer, a tempter. The Hebrew word for Satan means ‘Accuser’ or ‘Slanderer.’ That’s why people outside of the church often have such a negative view of God. They listen to his smear campaign against God and say, “Why does God want to spoil our lives and end our fun?” That is not true. It’s a false view of God peddled by Satan the slanderer.
As for Adam and Eve, they’ve lost their innocence and it’s gone forever. The choice they made set in motion consequences for them that were irreversible. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and there’s no way to get it back in. Sin is like a rash all over the human race. Some of you are parents. How many of your innocent children have you had to train how to lie or be spiteful? How many of your children, with no input from you, are naturally helpful and obedient? The explanation for this inbuilt downward bias is right here.
Once sin is out, it quickly unravels. God pronounces a curse on the man and the woman. Hard toil, pain and conflict are now the stuff of life, which has become a struggle. Adam’s relationship with Eve is now strained. Death has thrown a dark shadow over the garden. Worse, the man and the woman are banished from Eden and estranged from God. The first time you sinned, the first time I sinned, our relationship with God changed forever. From that day on we became sinners in need of a Saviour.
Ending
What the Bible says in Genesis 3 rings true with our experience. The humanist vision says we have all ascended from dark ignorance to great heights of intelligence. The Bible says, “No we haven’t.” What pride! God does not portray us as risen, but fallen and, without Christ, having no hope.
So, to finish, let us simply look again to the One who has stretched out his mighty arm, plundered hell and saved Adam’s helpless race; Jesus-Christ, the Author of an Eternal Salvation, the Desired of Nations, the Lord of Glory, the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Heir of all Things, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Risen One, the Bright Morning Star, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. To him be the praise and the glory for absolutely ever and ever.
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8th March 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment