Paradise Lost - January 18, 2015 - Sermon on Genesis Chapter 3
Yesterday I walked into a Pharma Plus store near my home to get some meds. As I walked up to the register I noticed a display with Cold Effects, an immune-system booster, on sale. Usually $27.99. now $12.99 with a coupon.
They normally have coupons at the counter, so I went up to the cashier, a fellow I’ve known for years, and commented that that was a great price for the Cold Effects.
He said, “Yeah, it is”. I asked him if he had a coupon at the desk that I could use, as I’ve done before, and he said, “I’m afraid there isn’t a coupon for that sale”.
I asked if it was a coupon you had to get online, or…you know…where could I get the coupon? He said the coupon doesn’t exist. I thought he was joking, but then he said the display had been up for a week. He’d obviously had the same conversation with many customers.
“So this product is on sale for $12.99 if you have the coupon, but the coupon doesn’t exist”, I said. He looked at me sheepishly and said, “Yeah, I guess”. I said, “Wow, by that logic I could offer you a $20,000 car for $5 with the coupon, but make sure the coupon doesn’t exist”. We laughed, and I left the store.
That’s kinda funny, but something is broken.
There are all kinds of examples of things that are broken in our world, most of them not at all funny. There’s the war with ISIS, which is still raging, even though the media has become bored with it and rarely reports it. Something is broken.
Boko Haram, a terrorist group in Nigeria, last year kidnapped 276 school girls ages 14-15 to be used as sexual slaves to terrorists. Something is broken.
There are literally millions of other examples, some large, some small, that point to a deep problem in humanity.
People treat each other terribly, nations go to war, and terrorism impacts every continent. And our personal struggles and problems and illnesses can be overwhelming, so that we live with suffering of a sort every day. Have you ever asked why? Have you ever wondered where this all started?
Well, today we’re going to explore what the Bible has to say about where this all started.
Was there a root cause to it all? Is there some solution to the problem?
We’re going to talk today about one thing that we don’t normally give a lot of attention to, and one thing, a vitally important question that is actually a question that has rung throughout the ages and continues to ring in human ears.
It’s a question that God asks every one of us. It’s a question God asked the first man and the first woman.
Today’s message is titled “Paradise Lost”, which is borrowed from the 17th century English poet, John Milton. He wrote a poem of the same title, that was a 10,000+ line poem about the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. I assure you, this message will be shorter that his poem.
The one thing that we don’t spend a lot of time talking about here at Church at the Mission is the enemy of our souls, Satan. In some churches you can find a lot of attention being given, even though it is negative attention, to Satan.
And the reason we don’t talk about him much here is that I’ve noticed over the years that when Satan is given a lot of attention, even with the good intention of warning people that he is real, we can very quickly get a distorted idea of Satan’s power in our lives.
To keep it simple, if God was a mountain, Satan would be a molehill. But, Satan though he is a defeated foe, beaten by Jesus on the cross, behaves as though he wasn’t defeated.
He’s a little like the Japanese soldiers who had been stationed on various Pacific islands during World War 2.
Their lines of communication were cut off during the war, and after the war they never learned, or perhaps never accepted, that the war was over or that peace that had been declared in 1945 when the Emperor of Japan surrendered to the Allied forces. For 25 years after the war, they still behaved as though the war might be won.
That’s a bit oversimplified, but it captures a key truth: Satan is small, limited and defeated. God is enormous, unlimited in power and glory, and victorious. THAT’S why we spend the vast majority of our time talking about the living God.
But today, because our Scripture goes there, and because there are some things we need to know about how the enemy works, we’re going to spend a few minutes learning about this enemy.
Christian tradition dating back to the early church fathers links the words of Jesus in Luke 10:18 with earlier verses in Isaiah and Ezekiel. Let’s look at this more closely.
After Jesus sends out 72 to heal the sick in Luke chapter 10, they returned with joy and said: “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” 18 And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you”.
Here Jesus refers to a passage from Isaiah chapter 14 that would have bene very well known to His Jewish followers: “12 How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! 13 You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. 14 I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” 15 But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit”.
The prophet Ezekiel continues to describe more about Satan: “‘You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. 13 You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you...You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you.
You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. 15 You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created till wickedness was found in you. 16 Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. 17 Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth; I made a spectacle of you before kings...19 All the nations who knew you are appalled at you; you have come to a horrible end and will be no more.’” Ezekiel 28:12-19
So this is perhaps helpful as we move forward in understanding some things about Satan, the enemy of our souls.
It’s important to note that, unlike God who has always existed and who brought everything into being from nothing, Satan is a created being: limited, cursed, defeated on the cross.
That had not happened YET in history in the Scripture we’re looking at today.
So Satan is limited, but one of the few tools that Satan has in his toolbox is a capacity to muddle, to cloud, to confuse, to obscure or to obfuscate.
The meaning of obfuscate itself is to make unclear or unintelligible, or to bewilder. He does this, always, in order to raise doubts about God’s character and God’s love. The first time he does this is in this chapter.
We see this in Genesis chapter 3, during his first appearance. He asks a question that misrepresents God, and then tries to impugn, to express doubt or call in to question God.
He says: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’. Verse 1 says that the serpent was the most crafty of the wild animals that God had made. Crafty means subtle and sly.
Immediately in the story he puts Eve in the position of having to defend against a negative statement that is, Satan knows, inaccurate and not what God said. But the question itself is insidious and sneaky.
It’s a bold statement: If you really think about it, what he’s implying is, ‘God’s not letting you eat from any tree in the garden. What kind of terrible God is that would make you starve like that?”
Of course, even as Eve defends, ‘God did not say that’, still Satan’s undertone of accusation remains. He has questioned God’s character.
And if we’re not settled on who God is, on His goodness and love, we will be susceptible, gullible when people raise questions about God.
And, the reality is that Satan banks on some people NOT being settled on Who God is. Satan likes us to sit on a fence regarding who God is and what our relationship to Him is.
Now this is not too far, really, from what some of us have experienced or read about, maybe recently. People will say, because there is suffering in the world, and because God is all-powerful, that God either doesn’t exist or doesn’t care.
Either way, the argument goes, God is not worthy of our worship.
The best answer to this question, what’s called the ‘free will defense’ or the fact that God has created humans not as robots, but as beings with free will, who can free choose to do good or evil, and to love or not love God, is typically ignored, without a reason.
But God’s character or His reality is thrown in question, and those who ask such questions, without a sincere desire to know the actual answer, are content to merely sow seeds of doubt.
What plays out in the rest of Genesis chapter 3 is Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve and their fall.
Now God had said to Adam back in chapter 2 that: “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 from it you will certainly die”.
God here is speaking of spiritual death, of dying to the source of life, who is God, and of separation from God. Satan says, in direct contradiction to God: “You will not certainly die”.
Jesus once said this about Satan: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies”.
Satan is limited. He is limited to appealing to things that are on the surface. His temptations in our lives are also about things that are on the surface, shallow.
Our own hearts tempt us, and Satan takes advantage of that by minimizing the importance and potential damaging effect that the sin could have - often leading us to not consider our relationship with God at all in the sinful action.
Typically Satan tempts us to focus on the pleasure of the sin - for instance sexual sin, or overeating and the like. Or he focusses on the potential boost to our standing or our pride...of gossiping, slandering others. He tempts us, lures us, and then when we fail, he accuses us: “See, you hypocrite! You call yourself a Christian?” Sound familiar?
So that’s more than enough about the enemy of our souls.
The second thing I want us to look at today is the fallout from the temptation.
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 8 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. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
So, whereas once Adam had walked freely in the garden with God, unafraid, unashamed, now he hides. Now he hides and God called out: Where are you?
In the narrative, Adam has an answer: I heard you in garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid”. Adam begins his familiar defense. First he blames God: “The woman YOU put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it”.
First Satan had tried to malign God’s character, planting seeds of doubt.
Now, with that doubt planted and taking root, and not without some arrogance, Adam blames the whole situation first on God. Those who reject God or who wish to sow doubt also accuse God.
The argument about God and suffering touches on this. “Bad things happen because God allows them to happen, therefore God is not good.”
As we see, it’s an old argument, rooted in a deep desire to not take responsibility for our actions. Adam blamed God for creating Eve, who gave him the fruit, rather than acknowledging that he had done something wrong. It’s that simple.
Eve, being smart and not wanting to shoulder the blame, says that the serpent deceived her and so she ate. Eve is a little more subtle than Adam, but her point is the same.
She’s really saying that the serpent, the one that God made, tricked her. So she shifts the blame on to the serpent, and indirectly onto God for having created the serpent in the first place.
What follows is the curse of the serpent by God, and then the alienation of the first man and the first women from God.
Nicky Gumble puts it this way: the man blamed the woman, the woman blamed the snake, and the snake didn’t have a leg to stand on.
But, we come back to God’s question of Adam: Where are you?
It’s a question for Adam. It’s not a question God asks because He doesn’t know where Adam is. God knows everything.
Whenever God asks a question in Scripture it’s rhetorical, meaning He already knows the answer - He just wants you to see the answer as well.
It’s a reflective question designed to make you stop and consider.
God asked Adam “where are you?” because Adam needed to see himself where he was.
Adam needed to see that something had changed in his relationship with God.
Whereas once he was completely uninhibited unself-conscious and open before God, now he hid in fear. shame. Once he came before God with boldness.
Now, in our story, Adam cowers behind the bushes. Instead of walking free in God’s world, he is shackled by shame. Instead of seeking the Father’s forgiveness, he hides his sin.
He thinks up excuses and does all that he can to avoid admitting that he had done wrong. He blames everyone who existed at that time - literally - God, Satan, his wife - everyone but himself.
He had known God - He walked with Him. He named the animals with Him. He knew His voice. He heard the tone, the character of His voice. Adam recognized God’s walk, His gait, when he approached.
But now...now both 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. But instead of rejoicing, they slinked among the trees in the garden, covering up their nakedness, because they had eaten of the fruit that God said not to.
Where are you? Where are you, Adam? Where are you, Eve? And those words that God spoke to the first man and the first woman, He has spoken to each man and woman who has lived since. No one can claim ignorance of God.
Romans 1:12 says: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.
But though he have no excuse before God, we’re sure good at coming up with half-baked reasons. Sin entered the world through Adam and Eve and that sin separated them from their walk with God.
Sin was birthed in Adam’s heart that day - and yet we find that Adam’s sin, as the first man, was not just his own. That day sin separated all humankind from God.
That’s why the Bible says that you and I were born into sin. King David said: Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Psalm 51:5).
Paul continues in Romans chapter 5:12-21, and he shows us how the story of The Fall, of Paradise Lost in Genesis chapter 3 connects with God’s solution to the problem.
This is how The Message paraphrase of Scripture renders it. This, really, helps us understand the problem and the solution:
“You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in—first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone...So death, this huge abyss separating us from God, dominated the landscape from Adam to Moses.
“Even those who didn’t sin precisely as Adam did by disobeying a specific command of God still had to experience this termination of life, this separation from God. But Adam, who got us into this, also points ahead to the One who will get us out of it.
“15-17 Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do!
There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence.
If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, sovereign life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?
18-19 Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, he got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one man said yes to God and put many in the right.
20-21 All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down.
“All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end”.
We didn’t have to invent sin all over again, it was already part of our nature to sin.
So the question for all of us is not “have I sinned?” Of course, we all have. And our sins come out of our sin nature, which was a distortion of our original nature.
The question is not “Have I sinned?” Because ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God. And the question also isn’t, “Ok, well if I’ve sinned...[meekly] are there consequences to my sin? Again, God has already said: “The wages of sin is death...”
The question is “where am I?” What can be done ABOUT my sin?
It’s not a trivial question. It’s a question that, really, all of eternity for you hinges on your answer to that question.
If your answer is: “I try to do more good than bad. I hope the scales balance out in my favour”, I’ve got bad news for you. You can’t earn ANYTHING from God.You can’t put God in your debt through your good works. It doesn’t work that way in the slightest.
We are either in Christ, trusting in what He did on the cross, trusting that He died for our sins, that He bore the penalty for our sin, and living in gratitude and grace and growing to be more like Jesus, or we’re still in our sin.
Still hiding from God. Still questioning God’s character, following the lead of that serpent. Still looking for some other way out.
Once a lawyer was very sick. Dying actually. A preacher came to visit him and found him reading his Bible. The lawyer said: “I’m doing 2 things. I’m cramming for my finals - and I’m looking for some loopholes”.
But there are no loopholes in God’s plan.
We started this current series on Genesis by focussing on the goodness and beauty of God’s good creation. We looked at the Song of Creation, and how good delighted in it,
He saw that it was very good. We talked about that original blessing. The way God wanted it to be.
Then last week we looked a bit at the history of creation, and of how God wanted Adam to recognize that God was God, and that Adam, as the one who is not God, needed to obey the master gardener, to follow God’s lead. That is how we were created to thrive in this life.
Today we’ve looked at the result of Adam’s rebellion, his failure to follow God’s plan, and the separation between Adam and Eve and God, and then, through Adam.
How sin penetrated and has permeated the world since, in all of its many manifestations, including what we know of in our own lives and what we see in the world around us, which is a mess.
One last word. We’ll give the Apostle Paul the last word from 1 Corinthians 15. In it he addresses anyone here who thinks that all there is is what we see with our eyes.
“If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.
The promise of God is that, when we repent of our sin, when we turn away from it, and receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we have full assurance of faith.
We can trust that we are saved, through the work of Jesus Christ, His sacrifice for us on the cross.
So…where are you? Where are you today? Are you walking with God, trusting in His grace, believing in His promises and embracing the cross of Christ – acknowledging that Jesus suffered on the cross for you sins, taking them upon Himself?
It’s God that asks the question of us, really. It’s a question that has rung down through the ages, since the first man and the first woman were separated from God by their sin.
If you have not yet placed your faith in Jesus Christ, I implore you to find peace through a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. We’re going to pray now, and if you wish to, you can ask Jesus Christ into your life right now. And if you’ve ever accepted Christ into your life, but find yourself yourself now far from Him, I encourage you to pray now as well.
We’re going to pray a prayer of confession, of repentance, of turning away from our sin and toward God, and of accepting Jesus Christ into our life. If that’s your desire, let’s pray together.
