ENGAGE
Let’s suppose that you get home from work and find that your Amazon order had been delivered that day. You open it up and there is the latest novel from your favorite author. You can hardly wait to get started reading it, but you eat dinner, spend some time with the family, tuck the kids into bed and then finally plop down in your favorite recliner and open up the book.
But instead of starting on page 1 like you usually do, you decide to skip the first 2/3 of the book and begin reading on page 231. And your first thought is that this book isn’t nearly as good as all the other books this author has written. The plot seems to be disjointed and none of the characters seem to be developed like they usually are. But the problem isn’t really with the author or the plot or the characters is it? The problem is the way you’ve chosen to read the book.
TENSION
But isn’t that the same way that many of us approach the Bible? We just want to jump in and begin with the biographies of Jesus at the beginning of the New Testament and skip all the books of the Bible that were written prior to the life of Jesus. We even call that part of the Bible the Old Testament, which implies that whatever is contained there really isn’t relevant to our lives today. I mean what would you rather read something ancient and old or something fresh and new?
But my goal for the rest of this year is to help us develop a whole new love for the Old Testament. Yes, in places it is full of the unpronounceable names of people and places that don’t seem all that relevant to us in the United States in the year 2017. Yes, it is full of things like blood sacrifices that are so foreign to today’s culture. Yes, it contains commands by God to go and kill and wipe out entire cultures that offend our sensibilities. Yes, it’s long – roughly twice as long as the New Testament.
But it also reveals God and His entire character and His plan to restore the relationships of all men who have rejected and rebelled against Him. And just like the first 2/3 of your favorite novel, it develops the plot and characters that are essential to the book as a whole.
I am both excited and apprehensive about this journey that we embark on today. I’m excited about the opportunity to help all of us gain a greater appreciation for and understanding of the Old Testament. But I’m also a bit apprehensive because the approach we’re going to use is quite a bit different that I’ve used in the past so it’s going to take me a bit out of my comfort zone. And it might do the same for some of you.
What I’m going to attempt to do for the remainder of the year is to weave together the stories of some of the major players in the Old Testament narrative in a way that will help us get a better feel for who God is and how He operates as well as gain a better understanding of the history of a people that God has called to Himself.
TRUTH
So go ahead and take your Bibles out and turn to the very beginning – Genesis chapter 1. The word “Genesis” actually means “beginnings” so that is where we’ll start this morning.
Our story begins with these words:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The rest of chapter 1 and 2 go on to describe that creation. Chapter 1 is an overview of that entire process and then chapter 2 focuses mainly on one aspect of that creation – the creation of Adam and Eve.
For each of the first six days of creation, God merely speaks the creation into existence beginning with “Let there be light.” But then if you skip down to verse 26, you’ll notice that there is a distinct change when it comes to the creation of man. Instead of merely speaking man into existence, God says “let us make man in our image, after our likeness”. And in chapter 2 we see how God did that. We see there that God loved man enough to personally take the dust and form Adam with His own hands and then He personally breathed His own breath into Adam to give him life.
We also see man’s value to God in the fact that after all the rest of the creation, God looked at it and said that it was “good”. But at the end of the sixth day, when He created man He proclaimed it to be “very good”. And God gave man dominion over all the creation and He blessed him and commanded him to subdue the creation and to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
But by the time we get to Genesis chapter 4, something has gone terribly wrong. We’ll look at that chapter next week and see that the world’s first murder is recorded there. So what happened in between the creation that was very good and the one where one brother kills another? We’re going to see the answer to that question in Genesis chapter 3 this morning. I could make a case that this chapter is the most pivotal chapter in the entire Bible because it sets the stage for everything else that happens in the world from that point forward. It also reveals the heart of God and develops the crucial concepts of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. So go ahead and follow along as I read that chapter.
[Read Genesis 3]
This morning we’re going to answer four questions:
1. What does this passage reveal about God?
2. What does this passage reveal about me?
3. How do we reconcile the concepts of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility?
4. Where is Jesus in this passage?
You’ll notice that I haven’t given you the usual “fill in the blank” outline this morning because my message is going to be more of narrative than a nice neat outline. So feel free to make your own notes if you like. For the kids that are here with us I have provided a little more structure to their handouts but parents will probably need to help your kids with them.
Let’s begin with the first question, which is really the key one:
What does this passage reveal about God?
If this is all the Scripture we had, we could develop a pretty accurate idea of who God is and how He operates.
The first thing we want to note here is that God is sovereign. It is His creation and He gets to make the rules and determine exactly how that creation is to operate. He alone decides what is acceptable and not acceptable within that creation. But within that sovereignty He did not create man as a robot. He created man in His own image, which means that man has the ability to make choices under God’s sovereignty. Since this is such an important concept, I’m going to come back to it shortly.
We also see that on one hand God is loving, gracious and merciful. When Adam and Eve sinned, He did not strike them dead on the spot, which is exactly what they deserved. In spite of the serpent’s words that assured Eve she would not surely die if she ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is exactly the penalty that God had promised in the instructions He had given to Adam in Genesis 2. But instead of executing immediate judgment, God exercises mercy and grace here. We see that in several of His actions:
• After Adam and Eve sin and they hear God walking in the garden, they hide. But God demonstrates his graciousness by seeking them out. God certainly didn’t have to do that. He could have let them stew for a while. He could have let them tremble behind their fig leaves every time they heard a noise in the bushes. But instead God sought them out, not because they deserved that in any way, but because it is His nature to be gracious.
And He doesn’t approach Adam and Eve in the way that we probably would have done. Instead of being angry and leveling accusations against them, God begins by asking a question. In fact, this is actually the first question we find God asking in the Bible. And when God asks a question, He isn’t doing it to gain information. He is doing it to get man to think about his situation. When He asks, “Where are you?”, He already knows where Adam is, but He used that question and the other questions He asked to help Adam and Eve recognize that they had sinned and were lost.
This is completely the opposite of how God approaches the serpent. Instead of asking questions of the serpent, God merely speaks to him and pronounces a curse. That is because there is no chance of redemption for Satan after his rebellion against God.
• The second act of mercy and grace is seen in verse 21 where we learn that God made Adam and Eve garments of animal skins. We’re going to talk more about the spiritual significance of this act a bit later, but for now I just want us to note how God cared for their physical needs, even though it is their sin that created that need.
• Finally, even though it might not seem like it to us, the fact that God banished Adam and Eve from the garden is also an act of mercy. Think about it. If Adam and Eve had been permitted to also eat from the tree of life, they would have continued to live in a state of separation from God, experiencing the consequences of their sin, for eternity. That would have precluded any possibility of being reconciled to God.
But love, grace and mercy are not the only traits of God that we see here. We also see that God is holy, righteous and just. He didn’t just tell Adam and Eve, “That’s OK. Don’t worry about your sin.” He imposed the penalty that their sin required. While they did not die immediately, as a result of their sin they would die physically one day, just as God had said. But even more serious is the fact that they were now dead spiritually.
God also imposed some serious penalties on Adam and Eve that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. While God was going to provide a way for their sins to be covered, that didn’t mean that the consequences of their sin were going to go away.
While I’m not going to spend much time focusing on how God deals with the serpent, it is important to note that God curses the serpent directly – “cursed you are”. You’ll note that God does not curse Adam and Eve directly, but only pronounces a curse on certain aspects of their lives. It is also interesting to note that God imposes these penalties in the same order that the rebellion against God occurred – first the serpent, then Eve and finally Adam.
As we’ll see in a moment, God would bring about man’s salvation and Satan’s destruction through the seed of the woman. But that would come at a cost to the woman as she would experience great physical pain in the process of childbirth. I’m not going to deal with the last part of verse 16 in any detail this morning since there are so many ideas about what it means exactly. But I think it is fair to conclude that regardless of the exact meaning the overall idea is that the marriage relationship is going to experience difficulties that God never intended.
Finally, God turns to Adam. Although God does not curse Adam, the ground that he has apparently cultivated with a great sense of joy up to this point, will now be cursed and so Adam will, for the first time in his life, experience what it means to sweat, thus creating a whole new business of creating chemical concoctions to try and keep man from sweating and to mask the accompanying odor. Even more devastating is the fact that Adam will one day die, just as God had said, and that his body would return to the dust from which God had created him.
So in this one chapter, we really find everything that we need to know about God. He is sovereign and He is both loving, gracious and merciful, as well as holy, righteous and just at the same time.
What does this passage reveal about me?
When I started to list all the things I can learn about myself in this passage I realized pretty quickly that I can’t begin to cover them all, so let me briefly address a few of the most significant. We’ll have time to talk about some of the other aspects in our Bible Roundtable.
The first thing we see here is that God gives me the ability to make choices. Our choice of words is really important here. Notice that I did not say that God gives man “free will” because that would imply that we are free to choose to do anything we want and that is just not the case. We can make choices, but only within the boundaries that God has established.
Let me illustrate. Let’s suppose that we have a big monsoon rain storm and that the Rillito River is flowing bank to bank. And you’re driving down Oracle Road on your way to the auto mall and you come to the bridge over the flowing river. You do have a choice of whether or not you are going to cross over that flowing river. But you can’t choose to fly over that river can you? If you do choose to cross the river you have to do that by crossing the bridge. So you can make a choice, but you don’t really have free will to cross that river any way you want.
God did not create Adam and Eve as robots who were programmed to do everything that God commanded. It is clear here that He gave them the ability to make choices – in this case the ability to choose between listening to the voice of God and obeying Him or listening to the voice of the serpent and obeying him.
This passage also reveals that I have the responsibility to choose wisely and that that there are consequences when I fail to do that. When Adam and Eve made the choice to rebel against God’s clear command here, they immediately suffered the consequences of their choice and those consequences would be with them for the rest of their lives. In spite of the efforts of both Adam and Eve to put the blame for their disobedience on someone else – even God Himself – we clearly see here that God holds each person responsible for his or her own choices.
The final thing I want us to note is that my sin produces shame and separation. The nakedness that Adam and Eve had experienced up until this point with absolutely no guilt now becomes a source of shame. Adam and Eve could no longer face each other as they had before, which created a sense of separation in their relationship. But even worse, they could not face God. For the first time in their lives they were afraid of God and so they ran and hid from Him.
Now that we’ve answered our first two questions, we’re now ready to tackle what is probably the most difficult of the four questions we’ll deal with today:
How do we reconcile the concepts of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility?
The simple answer is that we don’t. Hopefully you’ll remember from last week and from our study of Romans that the idea of reconciliation means to bring together two things that have been separated. While it is true that in our human minds the ideas of the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man seem to be contradictory concepts, the fact is that in God’s mind the two ideas don’t conflict at all. Both ideas are clearly taught here in Genesis 3 as well as in the rest of the Bible. So there is no need to reconcile these ideas in the first place because they have not been separated anywhere except in the finite mind of man.
I like to think of these two ideas as the parallel rails of a train track. In order for the train to make its way to its destination it must remain on both those rails for the entire journey. Both are equally important to the train, just as the concepts of the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man are both required elements of our relationship with God.
We certainly see both ideas operating in complete harmony here at the beginning of Genesis. We see that from the very beginning, man’s responsibility is an integral part of the order of creation. In His sovereignty God creates man and he determines three basic responsibilities of man that he is to carry out within that creation:
• Man is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth
• Man is to have dominion over the creation for the purpose of being good stewards of those resources
• Man is not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
Within those boundaries, Adam and Eve are given great latitude in carrying out those responsibilities. God had given them the ability to make all kinds of decisions about the details of how they went about those tasks. It is only when they get off the rails by violating those guidelines that God steps in.
The bottom line is that it is not the responsibility of man that is in conflict with the sovereignty of God, but what is in conflict is man’s desire to be sovereign. It is man’s quest for independence that causes him to rebel against a sovereign God.
But here’s the good news. Even when man does rebel, it is the sovereignty of God that makes it possible for Him to pick up the pieces and use even that which is evil to accomplish Hs purpose and create good. And we see that here in this passage when we answer our last question:
Where is Jesus in this passage?
There are going to be a lot of Old Testament passages we will be looking at where we may not be able to answer this question, or at least where it is going to be much harder. But there are a number of places where we see Jesus in the first three chapters of Genesis.
The first place where we clearly see Jesus in the Bible is in Genesis 1:26 where God says “Let us make man in our image.” The plural pronouns there are a clear reference to the triune God, an idea which Paul confirms in Colossians 1 where He writes that all things were created by Jesus.
I can’t be dogmatic about this at all, but there is at least the possibility that when we see God walking in the garden in the cool of the day that this is Jesus. If so, this would be the first of many Christophanies, or physical appearances of Jesus in the Old Testament. While it is certainly possible that God the Father could take on the appearance of human body and walk with Adam and Eve in the garden, in general Jesus is the only person of the Triune God who has a body of flesh.
But the most intriguing way we see Jesus in this passage is in verse 15. Let me read that verse again:
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
At this point, God’s judgment is clearly addressed to Satan, since, as we see later in the New Testament, Satan had appeared to Eve in the form of a serpent. And God reveals that there is going to be enmity not only between Satan and Eve, but between their offspring. That likely is a reference to the battle of the ages between the children of the evil one and the children of the Messiah. That is brought into focus in the second half of the verse where the singular pronouns “he” and “you” refer to particular individuals.
This is a prophecy of the Messiah, one that is obviously veiled to Adam and Eve and probably to every other person who lived right up until the time of the birth of Jesus. The fact that the Messiah would be the offspring of the woman, but not of the man, points to the virgin birth of Jesus since he would be the seed of a woman, Mary, but not the seed of any human man.
There even seems to be a reference to the manner in which Jesus would die since those who were crucified would literally have their heels bruised as they tried to push up their bodies to be able to breath. But through the act of dying on the cross the Messiah, Jesus, would deliver a fatal blow to the head of Satan.
Finally, as I mentioned before, the covering of Adam and Eve with the skins of an animal also have great spiritual significance. As God killed an innocent animal to provide that physical covering for Adam and Eve, that act pointed ahead to the fact that God would require the blood of an innocent sacrifice in order to cover our sins.
APPLICATION
We’ve developed a lot of information this morning in this message, but how do we apply what we’ve learned in our lives? Let me briefly share a couple of implications for our lives:
IMPLICATIONS FOR MY LIFE
1. My sin is never a private matter.
How often does the world try to convince us that our lives are a private matter? We’re told that what we do in the privacy of our homes is no one else’s business, right? Now when it comes to the government’s involvement in our lives, I will grant that may very well be true to a degree. But not when it comes to our sin.
I’m sure Adam and Eve figured their sin was a private matter. After all, there were no other people on the earth yet. But as we’ll see next week, that just wasn’t true – their sin had a profound impact on their family. But even beyond that, their sin has impacted every person ever born on this earth because, as we saw in our study of Romans, we have all inherited Adam’s sin nature.
The lesson we learn from Adam and Eve is that there is no sin you can commit, no matter how secret it might be, that won’t affect someone else - your spouse, your kids, your family, your workplace, your community and even your church. When we get to David, we’ll even see how one sin affected the future of a whole nation.
2. Although God forgives my sins when I confess them, He doesn’t always take away the consequences.
We’re going to explore the idea of Adam’s faith a bit more during the Bible Roundtable, but God’s actions here in this passage indicate that at a minimum He put into motion a plan that would make it possible for the sins of Adam and Eve and every other person ever born on this earth to have their sins forgiven. But as we see clearly here that does not mean that God is under any obligation whatsoever to remove the consequences of my sin.
In fact, the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin remain with us today, don’t they? Women still experience pain in childbirth and men still sweat. And we will all return one day to dust.
Sin is a horrible, destructive force. It ruins lives and destroys relationships. And often, even though God may forgive those sins, the consequences often remain for generations. We need to remember that before we make the choice to enter into sin.
INSPIRATION
So now that we’ve taken a peek at the opening chapters of the greatest book ever written, don’t you want to read the entire book cover to cover and not just jump in 2/3 of the way through the book? Don’t you want to see what each and every chapter reveals about the characters in this great story? Don’t you want to be in on every detail of the plot so that you can better understand how each part of the story fits into the whole?
I know that I do and I look forward with great anticipation to that journey.
[Prayer]
ACTION
1. Join us for the Bible Roundtable at 11:00 where we’re going to discuss these ideas as well as some that I didn’t have time to cover in the message.
2. If you can’t stay for that time or you serving or taking part in another group during that time, take some time to read through and think about the discussion questions and talk about them with someone else.
Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable
1. Why do you think that the serpent approached Eve and not Adam? Why did God hold both Adam and Eve accountable?
2. What false things about God did the serpent try to get Eve to believe? How does the world around us do the same thing to us today?
3. Some people claim that by allowing Adam and Eve the ability to make the choice to sin, God actually created evil. How would you respond? (See also James 1:13-15 and 1 John 2:16)
4. How do Adam and Eve respond when God confronts them about their sin? What are some ways we essentially do the same thing?
5. What does the name that Adam gives to his wife indicate about his faith in God?
