OPEN: A woman had volunteered to teach a Sunday School class for toddlers. She was teaching them about Creation, and she started the class by asking questions like “Who made the trees?” and “Who made the sun?” The children responded, “God did” and the woman She was pleased the children were quickly learning that God made everything.
But she admitted that teaching her daughter at home was more of a challenge. For example, she was struggling to teach her daughter to pick up her toys, but her daughter wasn’t learning very quickly. One day she walked into the living room to find toys scattered everywhere and exasperated the mother said, “Who made this mess?” Her daughter looked up at her, and with a proud smile said, “God did!” (Carol J. Rivest, “Heart to Heart,” Today’s Christian Woman)
GOD MADE EVERYTHING. He made the trees and the sun, the moon, the stars, and the birds and the fish - everything. So it seemed only logical to this little girl that God made… the mess too.
In our text today, we’re going to talk about the mess that got started in the Garden of Eden. It’s the mess (we know of as) the sin of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now in this month’s sermon series we’re focusing on some very sincere questions about religion by one of my favorite YouTube hosts named Joe Scott. And his show (on YouTube) is called “Answers With Joe” Joe said this in his monologue on the question of “Is There A God” where he tells of us of struggling with his faith. He said: “A lot of the little idiosyncrasies of the dogma, just didn’t add up for me anymore. Like, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then why does He need my help? And my money? Why did God have to kill His Son in order to forgive my sins? Why couldn’t He just forgive me? For that matter, why did He make sin in the first place? (see footnote)
So, DID God make sin? Did God make the mess? Well, Joe Scott thought so - that’s why he asked the question.
We’ll get to Joe’s question in just a few minutes, but first we need to realize that people have all kinds of views on sin. For example, there’s a lot of people who REJECT the idea that sin even exists. The liberal talk show host Bill Maher claimed that “We wouldn’t even know what sin was if it wasn’t for the bible.” In other words: The Bible made it up! Sin doesn’t exist. And he’s not the only one - there’s lots of people who try to DENY that sin exists.
ILLUS: The advice columnist - Dear Abby - was once asked: “Dear Abby, I’m having an affair with two women. I can’t marry both of them. What should I do? And please don’t give me that stuff about morality.” Abby’s response was priceless: “Dear sir, the only difference between animals and humans is morality. I suggest you write your veterinarian for advice.”
In other words: if you’re going to behave like an animal go talk to your vet. Don’t ask me for advice!
Sin has been downplayed so much in our society that a famous Psychiatrist named Dr. Karl Menninger once wrote a book entitled “Whatever Became Of Sin?” where he stated: “(Sin) was a word once in everyone’s mind, but now rarely if ever heard. Does that mean that no sin is involved in all our troubles…? Is no one any longer guilty of anything? Guilty perhaps of a sin that could be repented and repaired or atoned for? Is it only that someone may be stupid or sick or criminal - or asleep? Wrong things are being done, we know; tares are being sown in the wheat field at night. But is no one responsible, no one answerable for these acts?”
To acknowledge sin is to acknowledge personal responsibility. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t want to do that. They don’t want to acknowledge they have sinned. But the fact of the matter is sin does exist. Every world religion recognizes this truth. And even unbelievers can feel the pain that their sins have left behind the guilt and shame of past behavior that causes a kind of self-hatred.
ILLUS: A clinical psychiatrist named Jordan Peterson said he rejected the popular idea that people felt “valuable” all the time. “Well, it’s NOT obvious to me that people think they are valuable all the time. They certainly don’t think that when they’re depressed… or suicidal. They don’t really think that when they’re ashamed, or guilty, or frustrated, or disappointed or angry or waking up at 3 in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences. They don’t necessarily think that …when they’re fighting with their family or when they’re upset at work or, you know, when things go wrong in life.” (https://www.facebook.com/drjordanpeterson/videos/2322886067950271/?sfnsn=mo&d=n&vh=e)
That phrase “They don’t really think (they’re valuable) when they’re ashamed, or guilty, or frustrated… or waking up at 3 in the morning and tormenting themselves with their consciences” resonated with me because I’ve felt shame. I’ve felt guilt. I’ve woke up at 3 in the morning and struggled with my conscience. I think we all have done that at one time or another. And the reason we’ve felt like that is because we’ve all sinned. We’ve all messed up. We’ve said things, and done things, and thought things that have made us want to crawl under a rock somewhere.
David described it this way: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD’—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” Psalm 32:3-5
Mark Twain (not a particularly religious guy) once said: “Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.”
Now, that brings us back to Joe Scott’s question “Why did God make sin?” And there’s something inside of most of us that says: “Whoa! God didn’t make sin. It was Adam and Eve’s decision to disobey God that did that. After all, God told them not to eat of the fruit… and they did it anyway. It’s their fault, not God’s.” And that’s true!!
But I think - behind Joe Scott’s question - is this issue: If God didn’t want Adam and Eve to sin, why put the tree in the garden to begin with? Why not just cut the thing down and make a bonfire out of it? Why make it so easy to disobey God? And you could say the same thing about any kind of sin. Why make alcohol so easy to make so it can make us drunk? Why make sex so appealing that people have sex with other people than their spouses? Why make it so that people can so easily be greedy, or angry, or selfish, and so on, and so on, and so on!
It could be reasoned that, God made sin, because He made it so easy to do! God made sin possible. And its obvious that’s exactly what He did. He deliberately put the tree in the MIDDLE of the Garden, and He deliberately commanded Adam “Don’t eat!” In fact (outside of “Be fruitful and multiply”) this was the only command He gave them.
But why would He do that? Why make sin so easy to do? Why allow them the ability to engage in disobedience. Well, He did that (believe it or not) because we are important to Him. We were created in His image. As Genesis 1:27 says “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Adam and Eve were the crown of God’s creation. With everything else God created He simply SPOKE… there it was. But when God created Adam and Eve He got His hands dirty. Genesis 2:7 explains “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” God didn’t do that with anything else he created, because nothing else that He created mattered as much to Him as us
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a gift if you will. A gift of TRUST - “I trust you to with the freedom to obey or disobey my commands”. A gift signifying the ability of FREEWILL He’d given mankind.
Now, not everyone believes in Freewill. In fact, the night after I completed this sermon I was browsing through YouTube and came across another video by Joe Scott entitled: “Do You Have Free Will? (Hint: Not Really)” (found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiqJp2scmPU&t=586s). In that video Joe Scott explained that scientists have essentially taken the brain apart and arrived at an understanding of how it works and how various stimuli influence our decisions. Their conclusion, there’s no such thing as freewill. The brain arrives at its conclusions entirely based upon the input of outside stimuli – and that stimuli is not always reliable.
Now, there’s a couple of fallacies built into that argument (that “understanding how the brain works” eliminates the presence of Freewill). The first fallacy is the false belief that the brain is “the sum of its parts.” If you ignore the idea that the brain is God’s invention (without God we're reduced to a machine-like automaton), you’re still faced with the issue of “synergy” – which is when, literally, synergistic parts work together, and accomplish more than they could alone. The brain could reasonably be seen as a synergistic energy source which accomplishes freewill – something you’d never expect by simply examining the individual parts.
The 2nd fallacy is that some scientists believe that, once they've "explained" a phenomena about how the brain processes information, that what they've discovered is so outlandish that it shows how unreliable the brain is. In reality, what they've revealed is how complex the brain is in processing information (which is why the brain is more powerful and complex than our most complex computers). The brain, and the way it processes information is sometimes counter-intuitive, such as how the eye and the brain interact. The eye views the world "upside down"
- but when that information is processed by the brain... the image is seen "right side up". That doesn't make sense, but that's how it works. The point? What scientists perceive as "unreliable stimuli" are actually fairly complex workings of a marvelous creation of God.
And the 3rd fallacy is these scientists, who’ve concluded that we have no freewill because they’ve explained it away, have put themselves in a box. If the brain is nothing more than a machine that responds to unreliable outside stimuli, then the conclusions of those scientists would become suspect… because the conclusions of those scientists would be the result of unreliable outside stimuli.
(For the casual reader, I didn't use those previous 3 points in the sermon {mostly I focused on the 3rd point}... it would have been way to complicated and distracting for the audience. I put them in this sermon to share with Joe Scott for his consideration).
The Bible undeniably states that God gave us freewill. He gave us the right to make good decisions… and bad decisions. But, as one man put it… “Giving us freewill was a colossal risk on God’s part.” (“The Sacred Romance” by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge page 78). God was almost guaranteeing that sooner or later we’d made bad decisions. If that’s true though, why would GOD take such a big risk? Why would He allow us the ability to do bad things – evil things - and potentially damage and destroy what He’d created?
Well, He did that because we were His most important creation and He wanted us to love Him and honor Him - by choice. He didn’t want us to be like robots who had no choice - who could only do what they’ve been programmed to do.
ILLUS: There’s the story of 2 mothers were talking about their sons. The first said, “My son is such a saint. Not only hasn’t he not looked at a woman in over three years, but he hasn’t touched a drop of liquor in all that time.” “My word,” the 2nd mother said. “You must be so proud.” “I am,” the first mother replied. “And when he’s paroled next month, I’m going to throw him a big party.”
Now, why was that boy such a saint? He’d been in jail! He had no choice but to live a “saintly” life (for the most part). In jail he had little (if any) freewill. But once he left his prison cell - now he had to make a decision. A decision of whether he lived as a good life… or as a bad life. Once he left prison he had the free will to make that choice.
Now, here’s the deal – the real question is NOT: did God make sin? The real question is – what do we do about our sin? Scripture is very clear that we’ve all messed up; we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. So how do we deal with that sin in our lives?
Well, let’s look at how Adam and Eve dealt with their sin.
1st – they tried covering their sins up. Genesis 3:7 “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”
I don’t know about you, but sewing leaves together to make clothes doesn’t sound like a good idea. All it takes is a good stiff breeze… and you’ve got a problem. But people have tried “covering up their sins” for centuries.
Generally they try to hide the bad stuff they’ve done… behind “good stuff.” They think if they can just do enough good stuff, they can hide bad stuff that brings them shame, and then they don’t have to think about it anymore. But the problem is - just like trying to cover your nakedness with fig leaves - covering your bad deeds with good deeds only covers so much. After awhile, something you don’t want seen… peeks out. And when the bad stuff from your past peeks out, the self-doubt begins all over again and you start to wonder if anybody would want to have you around anymore… or wonder if God could ever love you.
2nd – Adam and Eve tried hiding from God. “The LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’” Genesis 3:9-10
People hide from God in many ways. They hide behind things, behind wealth and entertainment and partying. They’ll hide behind alcohol and drugs. They’ll hide behind busy work, and fill their lives with all kinds of activity. Because the more stuff they can surround themselves with, the easier it is to crowd out the thoughts of deeds that bring them guilt and shame. Because, if they have time to think, their conscience starts to bother them and then they’re back to square one all over again.
ILLUS: I once read about a young woman who did something that shamed her. And she said “I curled myself up in bed, trying to make myself invisible. If God couldn’t see me, maybe he wouldn’t be disappointed in me.” (Fantasia Barrino, Guideposts, July06, telling about getting the night she got drunk). Of course, trying to hide didn’t work her because, eventually, the embarrassment and humiliation all came back with a vengeance.
3rd – Adam and Eve tried shifting the blame. God said to Adam “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" And the man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate." Genesis 3:11-12
It’s not my fault, Adam said. Was that true? Well, kinda. Adam figured he did a bad thing, but Eve did worse. After all it was her who offered the fruit to him. If she hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have sinned.
ILLUS: And people use that kind of warped thinking all the time. A counselor once told me of a couple that he’d worked with. One of them was always blaming their spouse for things they hadn’t even done. “Why would they do that?” I asked. “Because,” he replied, “if that spouse wasn’t guilty… the accuser had to be.”
The problem of course, is that when we stand before the judgement seat of God, blaming others for our shortcomings isn’t going to work. God’s not going to ask us what someone else did. All He’s going to look at is – what did YOU did (or I did)!
But that’s how people have always tried to deal with their shame and guilt. They tried covering their sins, hiding from God, or blaming someone else. And it works for awhile. But only for a while! Those are homemade remedies to their problem. How much better it would be if they turned to the great physician to heal the wounds of their sins.
What’s God’s solution? Get rid of your sins. Not hide them, not excuse them, not explain them away. God proposes to wash our sins away. Kind of like when you come in from working in your garden and you’re all sweaty and filthy. What do you do? You step in the shower and you wash all that away. That’s essentially what God proposes we do with our past guilt and shame.
A good case study is the man we know of as the Apostle Paul. Before he became a Christian, he wasn’t a very nice man. He persecuted the Christians of his day – arresting them, putting them in prison for their faith, causing them to be beaten and even killed. Once Paul became a Christian though, he realized the terrible things he’d done. He even wrote to Timothy saying “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.” 1 Timothy 1:15
How did Jesus save Paul? Jesus washed his sins away. Paul said that God sent a man to him name Ananias who told him “Rise and be baptized and WASH AWAY YOUR SINS, calling on his name.” Acts 22:16
God’s offer is simple. You don’t have to go through weeks of classes or do some difficult task. All He asks is that you recognize that you’ve failed. You’ve sinned. You’ve messed up. And you don’t want to be like that anymore. Then turn to Jesus and be buried with Him in a watery grave, rising up to walk in newness of life. As I Peter 3:21 tells us: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ”
The answer to Joe Scott’s question is that God didn’t make our sins, but he gave us a way to wash them away.
INVITATION
Footnote: A short transcript of Joe Scott's monologue: "IS THERE A SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION FOR GOD?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3_0O-gpeYo
(Joe grew up in a very religious family and it never occurred to him that there wasn’t a God who loved him and cared what happened to him).
"The older I got, the more complex the issue of religion became to me. I saw people from church acting very unChristian. You know, wearing a cross necklace and then judging other people, and being rude. I worked in a restaurants where I saw first-hand that the church crowd are the worst tippers in the whole world.
And a lot of the just little idiosyncrasies of the dogma, just didn’t add up for me anymore. Like, if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then why does He need my help? And my money? Why did God have to kill His Son in order to forgive my sins? Why couldn’t He just forgive me? For that matter, why did He make sin in the first place?
If God is all love then why would He send me to hell for eternity because I didn’t honor my father and mother correctly? For that matter, why did He make hell in the first place?
It just became harder and harder for me to just believe… I mean, couldn’t it be possible that all religion is just a way for us to deal with the fact that we are mortal – that we have an end date? Is it just our way of dealing with the seemingly pointless nature of it all? I didn’t want that to be true. (He views himself as a seeker… constantly seeking for an answer)."
