Sermon Central
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From A Bad Start To A Fresh Start
Contributed by Mark Aarssen on Jul 13, 2012 (message contributor)
Summary: God provides a way out and a way back but it is not without a price. God requires that we confess our sins and then go further - to repent of our sins to turn away from them and not return to them then we have demonstrated true repentance.
From A Bad Start to a Fresh Start
Genesis Chapters 4 to 9
Scripture Reading - 2 Peter Chapter 3
Have you ever tried to make something wonderful and it turned out all wrong? Maybe it was a special cake for a special occasion that went flat when someone slammed a door and the cake deflated.
Maybe like me you built something special that didn’t quite turn out the way you planned.
For me it was a crib for our first baby. I assembled it all in the child’s nursery then later discovered I could not get it through the door of the nursery once I had it all built. I had to tear the door frame apart.
We have all had these kinds of Bad Starts that later led to a Fresh start and our Heavenly Father was the first to have this experience when through no fault of his own things went from bad to worse with the people he had created.
We have been looking at Creation - God’s New World filled with New Creatures
Human beings were the pinnacle of our God’s New world. They were hand made by God - Adam and Eve.
Things went along wonderfully until they sinned and broke the only law of Paradise.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Death had never existed in The Garden of Eden until we sinned. Ever since that day we have faced the consequence of our sin - Death.
Death would not have to wait long to demonstrate its destructive power in the lives of people as Adam and Eve reproduced and brought children into the world Cain and Able.
Able gave his best to God and Cain gave God his leftovers. God smiled on Able but frowned on Cain and Cain was jealous. What did he expect? Why would he think that God would be pleased to get our leftovers? He should have known better.
Ladies how would you expect your Husbands to react if all you ever put before them were the same old leftovers day after day?
Men how would you expect your wives to react if at the end of the day all the attention you ever gave your wife was what was left over after you have read the paper and watched the news or the sports?
What leftovers are we giving God? Do we think like Cain that God should accept our leftovers instead of our best our first fruits?
Our God did his best work when he created us but we took what was perfect and by our own decision destroyed what God had intended to last forever.
God had never intended that we should know what death was all about it was our own sin that brought that into our world.
The story of people continued and we see the tragic consequences of sin echoed as Able is murdered by his brother Cain.
Cain is marked by God and banished to become a wanderer.
Friends we see here just how far sin can set us apart from God and our fellow man. Murder was such a horrible thing that God would not allow a murderer to live near the rest of us. But God’s love was so great for us that he did not destroy Cain. Instead God marked Cain and left him to wander. Banished from the rest of us and forever identified with his sin so that others could easily recognize who and what Cain was.
The Bible story at this point seems one of absolute failure on the part of human beings. We had taken sin so far that we were now using it to destroy not just ourselves but one another. We were now wielding sin as a weapon against each other. It would take us some time to learn the wisdom of God’s law.
Romans 6:23 NIV - For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The world continued on its way with communities being established. Even Cain would start a community and Adam and Eve would also start again. But the result was that things went from very bad to worse.
Genesis 6:5 NIV - The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.
Genesis 6:6-8 - The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. 7 So the LORD said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air--for I am grieved that I have made them." 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.
