|
Trust Torn; Relationship Rent |
 |
 |
 |
|
Written by Pastor Darrell Cooper
|
|
Friday, 06 March 2009 10:11 |
|
Gen 3:1-13, 21-24
January 4, 2008 - Lindsborg Cov.
“Trust Torn, Relationship Rent”
(Trust/Faith)
Sermon
I am curious, by a show of hands, how many of you have started reading the Daily Bible this year? (Pause for response) And how many of you have already fallen behind in your reading? (Pause for response) And how many of you are four days behind in your reading? (Pause for response)
That was just for fun. My point is that if you haven’t yet decided to join us, it is not too late because you are no further behind than those of us who are already four days behind! You will need one of these Bibles though (hold up Bible as example) and they are still available. The paperbacks are slightly cheaper, but those are not in yet. I do have hardbacks immediately available.
Let me say a word about what to do if you fall behind. Life gets busy, so it is almost inevitable that you will at some point fall behind in your reading. When that happens, my suggestion is that you not try to catch up. Just skip to the current day’s reading and pick up there, because if you are like me and you try to read twenty chapters in one sitting, all you see is words going past your eyes on a page. And the most important thing is not that you get through the Bible, but that the Bible gets through you.
If you need some encouragement along the way, you might consider joining a small group. There are a couple different groups forming for the purpose of discussing together what we are reading individually. This might provide you with the needed accountability to keep going, and it is more fun to have companions with you on the journey.
If this just seems too daunting, if it is just too overwhelming to think about trying to read four chapters every day, you might like to consider getting a copy of Egermeier’s Bible Story Book. It is kind of the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of the Bible, so to speak. It would be especially good if you want to read to your children. I can order these for you as well.
Now, if you have no idea what I am talking about, let me explain. We are encouraging everyone to read through the Bible this year using this particular Bible. It uses the NIV text but rearranges it in chronological order. We are also preaching through the Bible at the same time. Four chapters a day translates to approximately 30 chapters a week. However, we will only be preaching about 10 verses from each of those sets of 30 chapters. So, I liken this sermon series to skipping a rock across a pond. When you throw a rock out across a pond it barely dips the surface of the water, and it skips far more of the water than it hits. That is kind of like what we will be doing with this series, skipping a lot more of the Bible than we actually cover.
If you would like to slow down and fill in the gaps a bit more, you could join Shelly’s Sunday School Class called the Big Picture. She is also teaching through the entire Bible at the same time, but will go into much greater depth and detail and be more comprehensive in her coverage of the subject matter. It is not too late to jump into that class either.
Now, today we begin with Genesis. We will start in chapter three, and I want to simply walk us through each of the verses in this chapter one by one. You probably already know that in the first two chapters of the Bible God tells us all about how everything got here, how He created everything out of nothing. He created the earth, the moon, sun, and stars, the sky and the birds of the air, the sea and its creatures, and the land animals. On the sixth day He created the pinnacle of His creation, man and woman.
Then, only one chapter later, we read about how everything in Creation got all messed up. So, lets begin with verse one of chapter three.
Gen 3:1a - Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. Right away we are introduced to a serpent. Who or what is this creature? Interestingly enough, the Genesis account never tells us. It just says it is one of God’s creatures, a serpent.
Now, it seems apparent from the rest of the story that there is nothing particularly strange or unusual about this serpent. Nothing about the appearance or behavior of the creature alarms Adam or Eve or strikes them as bizarre in any way. They apparently have no reason to be suspicious at all. The text says that the serpent comes up to Eve and starts talking to her. Now for us, that would be perceived as a bit unusual, right? Well, the fact that it provokes no response of surprise or suspicion from Eve indicates that perhaps before the fall animals could talk! It seems that at least serpents could talk. Which makes me wonder what else changed in the animal kingdom after the fall. It is fun to think about, but it is for another time.
Back to the question of identity. Who is this serpent? The Old Testament text does not tell us, but the New Testament does. We learn from New Testament passages like Romans 16:20 and Revelation 12:9 that Satan is the voice behind the serpent. He goes by various names in the Bible: Satan, Lucifer, the devil, the accuser of the brethren, etc. It is Satan’s voice that we hear in this passage, and he is the original liar (John 8:44). So, throughout the balance of this sermon I will use the terms serpent and Satan interchangeably.
Now, picking up in the second half of verse one: He [Satan] said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” I need to back up here for a moment. In the previous chapter, chapter two, God had created this beautiful garden and placed Adam and Eve inside of it and told them “You can eat from any tree you want. All these trees you see here are free food for you to eat except this one tree in the middle of the garden. This is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I don’t want you to eat from this tree because if you do you will surely die.”
Now Satan comes along and says, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Notice that Satan begins his attack by exaggerating God’s prohibition, suggesting that God has forbidden them to eat from any tree in the garden. It is interesting how he maligns God’s character by making Him appear to be stingy and unreasonable, as if God were trying to keep all the good things away from us.
Verse 2: The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
So, Eve corrected Satan by drawing a distinction between the general trees of the Garden and the one in the middle, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, in the process of repeating God’s command to the serpent, she changes it. Since we haven’t studied chapter two recently you might not have caught this, but Eve changes the wording of God’s command in three very subtle but, I will argue, equally significant ways:
First of all, she downplays the privileges God has granted them. In Genesis 2:16 God had said, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden”, but when Eve relays the message she says, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden” (Gen 3:2) Notice that she dropped the word “free”. Now, I acknowledge that this is a very slight change, but however subtle I think it is nonetheless significant. She has, at least in her own mind, de-emphasized the freedom that God has graciously given to them.
The second change she makes is that she adds to the prohibition God made. You may have already noticed this. In Genesis 2:17 God said, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. In Genesis 3:3 Eve says, “‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it”. Did God say they couldn’t touch the fruit? No. He never did. They could touch it, juggle it, play baseball with it if they wanted to. They just were not to eat it, on pain of death. But Eve essentially adds to the prohibition of God making Him appear to be more restrictive than He really is.
The third change she makes is she weakens the penalty for disobedience. In Genesis 2:17 God said, “for when you eat of it you will surely die.” When Eve repeats it in Genesis 3:3, she says, “or you will die” Notice that she drops the word “surely” from the warning. Again, this is a very slight and subtle change, but it is significant because she has effectively diminished the certainty of the consequence of disobedience.
I think this is interesting. Could it be that Satan’s exaggeration of God’s rule has led to a distortion of the rule in Eve’s mind? Could it be that Satan has planted a seed of doubt and confusion in her mind so she can’t quite remember exactly what God really said in the first place? Perhaps. Either way, both Satan and Eve imagine God to be more restrictive than He really is, and they imagine the penalty for disobedience to be less certain than it really is.
Verses 4-5: You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
At first blush, it sounds like Satan is flatly contradicting God here. “God says you will die. I say you won’t.” But on a more careful study it seems that rather than a direct challenge to God’s warning he is only questioning the certainty of the consequences of God’s threat. A paraphrase could be, “You don’t know for sure that you will die. Don’t you think you are being a bit melodramatic here? You don’t know that for sure, now do you?”
Then Satan offers an alternative consequence, a seemingly good one. He tells Eve that if they eat the fruit they will gain great knowledge and insight, becoming like God Himself. The implication? “The real reason God does not want you to eat the fruit is not to protect you, but to prohibit you, to keep something good away from you.”
Please hear this. If you do not listen or remember anything else I say in this whole sermon, please hear this: The essence of Satan’s deception is to cast doubt on the goodness of God. He tempts Eve to doubt God’s goodness, suggesting that God cannot be trusted. Satan plants a seed of doubt: “Perhaps God’s apparent concern for our well being is only a ruse to conceal His real motive, which is to keep us ignorant and therefore weak.” So, the first temptation, in its essence, was to persuade us to doubt that God is really good. Once we question His motives, then sin, and therefore death, is only one short step away.
Also note that the temptation was to become “like God”. That is still the root of every temptation today. It is the temptation to reject God and His will and to assert our own will. The temptation is to reject God’s command and decide for ourselves what is good for us. It is to say, “I don’t trust You, God. I don’t believe that You are really good. I don’t think You really have my best interests at heart. I think I know better than You do what is good for me, so I will make my own decisions, thank You very much. I will call my own shots. I will be the god of my own life. The root of every temptation is the desire to be like God in some way.
Verse 6a: 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
Eve carefully observed the fruit and saw that there were three things about it that were very appealing. It was good for food, it was pleasing to the eye, and it was desirable for gaining wisdom. These three things, by the way, represent the three most common arenas of Satan’s attack even today.
The first one is that the fruit was good for food. This is the arena of physical appetite. God has created us with certain physical desires. We have the desire for food, for sex, for sleep, and for a number of other things as well. These are all natural, God-given appetites. Sin is the attempt to satisfy these God-given desires in a non-God-ordained way.
For example, there is nothing wrong with being hungry. God created us to feel hunger. And there is certainly nothing wrong with satisfying that hunger by eating fruit from a tree. The sin comes from satisfying that desire in a non-God-ordained way, which is what Eve does when she eats the forbidden fruit. God wants to provide her nourishment, just not that way.
The second arena is that of physical appearance. Eve saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye. This is a common arena of attack as well. We often get tripped up by things that appeal to our eyes, beautiful things that we long to have. We could talk about that one for a long time.
The third thing is that it was desirable for gaining wisdom. In this arena, Satan tempts us to try to elevate ourselves in our own mind or in the eyes of others. It is an attempt to gain knowledge or power or possessions or abilities that we didn’t have before and therefore elevate ourselves to a higher status.
Now we come to the fall itself. Verse 6b; she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Now, let me ask you a question. Where was Adam when all this was going on? Where was that guy, anyway? Was he off somewhere taking a nap? Was he out playing with the lions and tigers and bears (oh my!)? No. Verse six says he was right there, standing right beside his wife.
What is also interesting is that in 1 Timothy 2:14 we learn that Adam was not taken in by any of this. He knew what was going on here. He could see right through the serpent’s attempt to deceive them. He wasn’t buying it. Now, they both disobeyed God and ate the fruit, but Eve was tricked into her disobedience. Adam was not. He knew good and well what he was doing, and he did it anyway. It is important to note that Adam deliberately violated a direct command of God. His rebellion was intentional and complete.
Verse 7a: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked
Now this too is very interesting, because what was it that Satan told them? All God told them was that if they ate of the forbidden fruit they would surely die. Satan came along and said, “Ahhh, I am not so sure about that. Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. But I will tell you what will happen. If you eat the fruit your eyes will be opened and you will become like God in His ability to know good and evil.”
Satan told the truth here, at least a half-truth, because what happened? They ate the fruit and their eyes were indeed opened. They had been naked the whole time but they never knew it before. They ate the fruit and then exclaimed, “Hey, we are not wearing any clothes!”
You see, before the fall, there was nothing between Adam and Eve. I mean nothing! There were no barriers at all between them and each other and there were no barriers between them and God. No barriers to the point that they were completely naked. That had always seemed quite natural and normal before, to the point that they had never even thought about it.
But now, that they had rebelled against God, they felt shame and wanted to hide. They wanted to hide from each other and they especially wanted to hide from God. This is one of the key foundational consequences of the fall into sin. Their relationships, both their horizontal relationship with each other and their vertical relationship with God were now marred. Their relationships were broken, twisted, distorted. There was a distance, a barrier between them and each other and them and God that had never been there before.
Verse 7b: so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
It is interesting to note that they immediately tried to fix themselves. They did not go running to God for help. They sewed fig leaves together to make clothing to cover their shame and nakedness. This created a rather shabby and pathetic set of clothes. Their attempts to fix themselves was inadequate because ultimately, only God can fix what we have broken.
And we essentially do the same thing today, don’t we? When we sin against God, when we blow it and make a mess of things, our tendency is not usually to go running to God to ask for help. Our tendency is to try to fix things ourselves. So we run to the bookstore for the latest self-help book. We write new year’s resolutions. We decide to turn over a new leaf. We become determined to pull ourselves up by our own boot straps and to reach deep inside the well of ourselves to find the resources we need to fix ourselves. And we end up sewing fig leaves together. Our attempts to cover our shame and fix ourselves is always shabby and inadequate because only God can fix what we have broken.
Verse 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.
I think we can assume that before the fall, when Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden, they would have rushed to be by His side. After all, this was their creator who loved them. He is full of amazing wisdom and knowledge and always has something powerful and beautiful to share with them.
But now, when they heard God walking in the garden in the cool of the day they no longer trusted Him or His goodness, so they tried to hide from Him among the trees. Already their minds and their emotions were all confused and distorted so they could not think straight. They were literally trying to hide from God behind a tree!
Now, let me ask you this question: Where did it all go wrong? At what point was this relationship broken? What was the exact point of separation? Was it when they ate the fruit? Was the fundamental breakdown of relationship when they disobeyed God? No. It was when they stopped trusting Him in the first place. Remember Satan’s original temptation? He was trying to cast doubt on the goodness of God. He was suggesting that God, in fact, did not have their best interests at heart and therefore could not be trusted. So, the fundamental breakdown was not disobedience, but lack of trust, which was then manifest in disobedience.
So, follow this progression with me. Doubt manifests itself in disobedience, which ultimately leads to death, a breakdown in relationship and in the end, an eternal separation from God. So, that is the pathway of destruction, the three D’s: Doubt, Disobedience, Destruction. It is important to understand the order of this progression because it is the key to understanding our salvation.
Think about this for a moment. Four thousands of years later, when God sent His Son Jesus into the world to initiate the Kingdom of God, what was the centerpiece of the gospel He preached? What is the foundation stone of the gospel? Is it obey all the rules? Is it work hard and be good enough for God? Is it keep all of God’s laws? No. Not at all? What is the central tenant of the gospel? It is faith, isn’t it?
Through Jesus, God is saying to us, “Here is where everything went wrong in the first place. Our relationship was broken because you stopped trusting Me. So, the fist step back into a right relationship with Me is faith. I want you to trust Me. I want you to place your faith in Me through the person and the work of My Son Jesus Christ. And if you do, if you genuinely believe, if your trust in Him is sincere, then it will automatically manifest itself in obedience to My commands.”
You see, the path of salvation parallels the path of destruction. Just as doubt manifests itself in disobedience and ultimately leads to death, so trust in God will manifest itself in obedience to God which ultimately leads to life eternal. So, once agin, the fundamental breakdown of relationship in the garden was broken trust in God, so God asks us to trust Him again.
This brings us to the redemption. Verse 9: But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
I think this is beautiful. It is my favorite part of this whole passage, because you see, even though we cut ourselves off from God, even though we rejected His authority and violated His command, He immediately goes out looking for us. God pursues relationship with us even when we try to flee and hide from Him. And note carefully, God is not pursuing Adam and Eve to punish them. He is pursuing Adam and Eve in order to restore them. God loves us and wants us to be near Him.
Our problem is that we don’t believe that. We don’t trust Him, so we run and we hide and we try to fix ourselves and we only get further and further away from both God and each other and in the end, everybody loses - everyone, that is, except the serpent.
So, God initiates the restoration of relationship with a question. Of course, God knows exactly where Adam and Eve are, but He is trying to draw them out of hiding back into His presence. Notice that He does not force His way into their hiding place and violate their will. God could have simply jumped right in front of Adam and said, “Gotcha!”. But He didn’t do that, and He still does not. God never violates our freedom. As much as it breaks His heart, He will allow us to run away and try to hide from Him while He stands in the garden and calls to us, calls us by name, inviting us to come out of our hiding place, come back into His presence and be restored to a right relationship with Him.
Verse 10: [Adam] answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
This is the first step in reconciliation: confession. It is only a partial confession, but telling the truth about our condition is still the first step in restoring a broken relationship marred by sin.
Verse 11: And [God] said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
God continues to draw Adam out by coaxing a more thorough confession from Him. “Who told you that you were naked?” They were never aware of their nakedness before and so this new awareness can only be explained in one way: “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Again, more questions. God asks questions to open our hearts and minds up to Him.
Verse 12: The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
I think it is interesting that one of the earliest and most basic manifestations of the fall is blame-shifting, the need to self-justify. We simply cannot bear to own our sin, so we shift the blame to others. We refuse to take responsibility for our own actions, so we claim victimhood status. This is nothing new. In fact, it is very old.
And who does Adam blame? He blames his wife and he even blames God. “The woman you put here with me–she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” And, of course, Eve does the same thing when she later shifts the blame onto the serpent. “I may have sinned, but it is not my fault. It surely has to be someone’s fault, but it is not mine.”
I still find myself doing this today. In recent weeks I have become painfully aware of my own tendency to do this as well. When something goes wrong, I immediately begin to look around for someone to blame for it, whether it is their fault or not. This is particularly true when it comes to my wife. No matter how unreasonable or irrational it is to blame her for something she didn’t do, I play the blame game and say, “Well, if you hadn’t been there . . .” Shifting the blame onto others is one of the earliest and most basic manifestations of the fall.
Skipping down to verse 21: The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Now, the text does not say this, but I think it is safe to infer from the overall arch of the story that what God does here is perform the first blood sacrifice. Adam and Eve had tried to cover their nakedness themselves, but they had failed. Only God can fix what we have broken. God kills an animal, perhaps a lamb, and literally covers the shame of their sin and nakedness. This is a picture of the salvation that is to come and it is a recognition that the penalty for sin is death. If we sin, someone has to die.
Now, the last few verses, 22-24: And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
When I was growing up, I always thought of Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the garden as a punishment for their sin. They messed up, so God blew the whistle and said, “OK, everybody out of the pool!”
But I have since come to see that this is not the right way to look at it. On a more careful reading we see that the banishment from the Garden of Eden was not a punishment, but a protection. They had already eaten from the forbidden fruit and were now in a fallen, broken state. God says that if they now eat from the Tree of Life they will be locked into their death curse forever. They will die in their current fallen state and so be separated from Him for all eternity. But God still loves us and does not want that to happen, so to prevent what would be an even greater calamity He removes them from the garden and even posts a guard so no one will even accidentally wander back in and eat from the Tree of Life. And then, presumably, the Garden of Eden was subsequently destroyed by the great flood of Noah.
All of this is to say that God loves us and wants what is best for us. The fundamental essence of temptation is to get us to doubt that God is good and therefore stop trusting Him, which will automatically lead to disobedience, which leads to death of relationship, both horizontally and vertically.
So, one of the most important keys to overcoming temptation is to know this and sincerely believe and remember that God is good and therefore has our best interests at heart and so we can trust Him. When He tells us to do something it is because it is good for us. When He tells us not to do something it is because it would hurt us. So know and remember that God is good and we can trust Him.
|
|
Last Updated on Friday, 06 March 2009 10:23 |
|
