Creation In Crisis
Genesis 3—Act 2
3/10/11
3KCOC
Introduction: The story descends.
Last week we began a series about telling the story of the Bible in six acts. The first act is about a good God who created a good creation. Everything was as it should be. The Hebrews call it “shalom,” which implies more than just peace, but an ideal harmony between God and his creation. God saw that everything was very good.
But something is wrong with the story. We read our news headlines and hear about shootings and tragic accidents. We are stunned by the sudden destructive force of nature in devastating events like we have recently seen in Japan. And much closer to home we are grappling with the death of a young boy who seemed to have the world at his fingertips and just inexplicably died in bed last week. What happened to that good creation from our good God? You see; if we only know the first part of the story, then we are at a loss when we encounter such terrible tragedies.
Creation was very good; just as God intended, but then it underwent a descent into crisis. A few weeks ago, my family visited the Carlsbad Caverns. If you take the trail down into the depths of the cavern you experience an impressive descent of over eight hundred feet. As you take a turn away from the opening all natural light is vanquished. The cavern is beautiful, but only because it is lighted. If something happened to the light, unimaginable horror would grip any of us and certain doom would befall us. This is very much what happened in the early days of creation. We were lured down into a cavern and then someone turned off the lights. But what does that mean? Is creation forever trapped in a pitch dark hole of horrors? The story itself will help clarify our situation. Read Gen 3:1-19.
Move 1: Why things got the way they are.
We never knew the world the way Adam and Eve did firsthand. We were meant to, but it never came to fruition. Adam and Eve enjoyed complete intimacy with each other and they knew no shame. Imagine that, if you can, an existence completely apart of any shame or embarrassment. Imagine a world where God personally visits you in a garden he created just for you. Imagine a world where the thought of suffering and death simply do not occur. In this world, you never have to toil for food, it is always simply on the nearest tree. I don’t know what their weather was like, but probably a lot less windy than Portales! It is hard to image a world like that, because ours is now so vastly different, but we have to try, if we are to understand what has been lost.
In this world, this paradise, are two trees at the center of the garden. One is called the Tree of Life and the other is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. You may eat of the TOL, but not the TOKOGAE. This is the only law our Creator has given us. Any other tree we may eat from, but just not that tree. It seems simple enough. And if we do eat from it, God warns us, we will surely die. Though we have never experienced human death in this Paradise, we know what that words means. It means it is all over. It means Paradise is lost, but still it is a very simple law to follow. No problem, right?
And we know what happens next. Here comes the serpent slithering up to us and asking ridiculous questions like, “Did God really say you can’t eat from any tree in the Garden?” That’s ridiculous! We set the serpent straight. No, he said we may eat from any tree in the Garden except this one. “What, this one right here? What’s wrong with this tree?” Don’t know; God said just don’t eat from it. “Oh, I can’t believe you are falling for that. You aren’t going to die. God knows if you eat from this tree that you will be as smart as him, even knowing the difference between good and evil.” Hmm…will I’ve never thought about it like that. The fruit does look pretty good and I wouldn’t mind knowing as much as God. I believe I will have a bite after all.
Now you are thinking, “Preacher, why are you telling the story like I was in the Garden? I would never eat the fruit. That was Adam and Eve who messed up.” But I told the story as if it were you, and as if it was me standing at the tree that day. The story isn’t really about fruit. It is about a choice. Will we trust the word of God simply because it comes from God? Or will we reject his word and pursue our own way in an attempt to become our own gods? You see, we have all eaten the forbidden fruit of Eden. We hear this story and we are yelling as Eve puts the fruit to her lips, “No, don’t do it!” And we fail to recognize the story in our own lives.
Move 2: Why things kept getting worse.
After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were expelled from the Garden. They did not die immediately, but since they could no longer eat from the TOL, the countdown to death was irreversibly started. The first recorded death in Scripture isn’t God taking a life, but Cain killing his brother Abel in jealously. Adam and Eve are the first parents to lose a child and they really lose two, since Cain is banished. From there the early world spirals downward until things are so bad that God decides to wipe his creation clean with a massive flood. Read 6:5-8. Just like in the Garden, man’s sinfulness affects all of creation, because man and woman are the stewards of creation. When they fall, everything falls.
Mankind survives through the family of Noah, but human sinfulness persists. God even chose a nation for himself that was to show the rest of the world how to honor the Creator, but instead they failed tremendously again and again until God is compelled to expel them from their land the way Adam and Eve were expelled from theirs. Israel admitted this about themselves. Listen to the long litany of their sins by their own admission. Read Ps. 105:6-43.
After their exile from their land it did not get better. Paul speaks to both Jews and Gentiles alike in Rom. 3:9-18. All are sinners; all are held accountable to God. Do you see what has happened? We followed a serpent down into a deep cavern and then he turned off the lights. And try as we will; we cannot get out. And creation itself is trapped with us, which is why Paul describes creation as in bondage and groaning in Rom. 8:20ff.
And now we stand in the present day still cast out from our Garden. Are reality is a now a dark inescapable pit. We cannot just blame Adam and Eve. Notice what Paul says in Rom. 5:12. Death came to all men, because all sinned. We all share in the failure of Adam. The shame of Eve is our shame. Our world is a mess and we have no one to blame but ourselves. It is popular to call natural disasters an act of God, but we were the stewards of creation. Even if indirectly, all such disasters are acts of rebellious humans. Nothing is as it should be. Shalom is broken and it certainly isn’t God who broke it.
Move 3: Why things aren’t nearly as bad as you think.
Yet, I have intentionally painted the picture darker than it really is. The inescapable pit of darkness assumes that God just left us there. But we had to conceive it that way, lest we fall under the delusion we could save ourselves and our world by our own efforts. Humanism teaches exactly that—the belief that through the basic goodness of mankind we can make the world a better place. Humanism is a different story than the story of the Bible, but we often fall into that story. The story of the Bible is that humans and creation are irretrievably lost without the intervention of God.
But God did intervene. Adam and Eve don’t die right away. God will not give them up. Though banishing humans from the Garden, he clothes them in the midst of their shame (Gen. 3:21). Though destroying the world with a flood, he also preserves it through Noah. In their worst failures, God would not wipe out Israel, but continued to preserve a remnant and work his plan for the world. In our sin and rebellion, God would not hand us over to hell, but took on flesh and died on the cross to redeem us. Even creation itself is not given up to annihilation. Rom. 8:21.
The story didn’t end on that fateful day in the Garden. Not only that, but God had always anticipated that turn of events and already had the plan to remedy the situation. It would not be easy. It would ultimately require the blood of his own Son. That isn’t until Act 4 in our story, but even now we can’t talk about Act 2 without speaking of what God has done to rescue his creation from crisis.
When you are at the bottom of that cavern after a certain time of day, you are no longer allowed to go back up the trail. There is only one way out. You must ride the elevator back to the top. You can get yourself down into cavern, but you can’t get yourself out. So, it is with us. We got ourselves into this predicament through sin and it is only God who can lift us out. We cannot go back out the way we came. We must trust in God and what he has done for us, if we are ever to see the light of day again.
Move 4: Why things don’t have to be bad for you.
We do not know why things happen in this world like we saw with Peyton last week. No sermon could ever tell you that, but we can understand generally why we live in a world where such things do occur. We live in creation that still endures the effects of the tragic events of the Garden, but it also a world presently experiencing the redemption of Christ Jesus. That redemption is assured by the blood of Jesus, but it is not yet fully inaugurated and it won’t be until Jesus returns to usher in the new heavens and the new earth.
So, we live in a world caught in tension and struggle, but we do not live in a world without hope. God has never left us alone even though we deserved it. The consequences of sin are real and tragic, but the image-bearers of God continue to receive his mercy in the midst of his judgment.
It is essential that we not forget that this current world is a fallen world. And though the image of God remains in every human, it is need of redemption. Forgetting this aspect of our story is dangerous. In Richard Adam’s Watership Down, he relays to us a world or rabbits who live by the memory of their stories. The rabbits know their world is dangerous and they use their energies for survival. On the day that the god of their world was giving out the abilities to the animals, the rabbits’ ancestor came late. So, all that was left for the rabbits were strong legs for speed and the ability to recognize danger and run.
But in one episode of the story, the rabbits find a warren that is spacious and the population thin. The rabbits are large and have plenty of food. Strangely, they know nothing of the story about how the rabbits came to be who they are. They don’t care to learn; they don’t care to tell stories anymore. But the rabbits of Watership Down discover the warren of these fat rabbits is the creation of a farmer, who realizes he does not have to build a rabbit hutch if he only snares a few at a time and keeps the others well fed. They had paid an awful price for forgetting their story.
As people who know the story of God, we should be neither shocked by the goodness or the evil we find in this world. They are both evidence that the story we read on the page of the Bible is real. Horrible people can do good deeds, because the image of God is still in them. Good people sometimes do inexplicably horrible things, because that same image is corrupted by sin. Our world can be both spectacularly beautiful and instantly deadly. It is those who know their story that can cope in this world, because they find solace in the God who does not give up his world and he does not give up his people.
If you have not already, it is time you let God take you on that elevator ride out of this cavern of our own making. God didn’t intend for us to get down there and he doesn’t intend to leave us, but you can’t get out by your own efforts. You must let God rescue you and he offers to do so this very day through Jesus Christ. Those who know the story, know there is nowhere else to go. Let Jesus rescue you today.
