As we see, of course, the Bible is one continuous story, but we’re going to be looking at the major moments of transition and the unfolding of the covenant of redemption. And today we’re starting with the fall. God’s good creation turns bad as we look through the reading of God’s word. If you’d please join with me in prayer.
Our Father, majesty and bounded, worthy of all worship, and you, Christ, are the King of glory, the eternal Son of the Father, and you, Holy Spirit, our advocate and guide. We praise you and declare your great worth, O triune God. And from your word today, we ask that you would reveal to us your truth for our lives, that your truth would conquer our anxious and sinful hearts. And this we pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Beginning in verse one. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the trees, as in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.
But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that was of light to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired, to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some the fruit to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
And then they heard the sound of the Lord God walking the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Somewhere from among the trees of paradise comes an intruder, a tempter who questions the very goodness of God lurking in the shadows. And he now comes forward, unsought, unsummoned, unannounced. We’re meant to be caught off guard, peering cautiously forward as something wicked this way comes.
We see in verse 1, the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the Lord had made. And he said to the woman, did God actually say. Did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And in a few short Sentences compact, succinct. Paradise is overthrown.
Man, who is made a little lower than the angels, is undone with a surgeon like scalpel work. From this intruder, the first temptation leaves him in a wake of disobedient despair. The ones who are to rule over the rest of creation are ironically undone. The temptation was from the vegetation. The tempter was from the animal world.
These things that God had set Adam and Eve over earlier. Back in chapter two, we had this extraordinary verse that Adam said when the man had his wife brought to him. And he said, the man and his wife are both naked and were not ashamed. Naked, not ashamed. And we come then to hiding in shame.
Here in chapter three. The openness of their love before one another to the hiddenness of their shame, their very experience of their own bodies has now changed. The meaning of our body shapes the way we live in those bodies. What does that mean? The human body has the power to express the very love that makes a human person a gift for someone else in a relationship.
Our bodies were to communicate a spiritual reality, one to another. And now all of this has changed. Rather than express a personal communication, our bodies have become objects of attraction, a source of shame, a source of resistance to the Holy Spirit. And because our identities still reflect God’s image, as we’re told back in chapter one, we’re made in the image and likeness of God. We have this inner struggle and warfare that takes place within us.
One writer put it this way. He said, shame reduces sex from a personal, personal communion to mere sensation. Because of shame, people engage in sex without self giving. They give and withhold simultaneously the very foundation of Adam and Eve relationship. It’s changed.
And that gets played out now through all of human history. Because the Lord has made us for unselfish relationship with himself and with one another. We must have our shame or our alienation covered to image God rightly once more.
There are many different ways that we can look at chapter three to be sure, but we’re going to look at this breakdown of the human family. Back in chapter two. The Lord had said that Adam being alone was not very good. And Eve was then brought to him and the two were to become one. But now here they both are, alone and alienated in one another’s presence.
The tempter comes and he divides them from the Lord from one another. And we see that with his very words. Did God actually say, you will not surely die. And then he goes to question God’s goodness. The intent of what God had from verse 5.
For God knows That when you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Notice how God has become objectified. The serpent does not speak with God or to God, he speaks about God. The Lord himself has become an object of a discussion rather than a person to commune with. You see how this goes forward, then, into humanity.
They made God an object, and that’s exactly what they’re going to soon do with one another. Notice in verse six that the senses played a role in this first sin. She sees, she touches, she tastes, she delights in what she sees. There’s pleasure in what she is doing.
All sin begins by being sensual. Then it becomes bestial. And finally, if the sinner advances far enough, it becomes Satanic. This alienation that the first man felt, being alone before creation, before the woman was brought to him, now descends on the two of them together in what will turn out to be a relational wasteland. The Lord comes down and we read in verse 8, the man, his wife, hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God because God had given them a boundary, a prohibition.
People get hung up on the fruit, or what kind of fruit. It really doesn’t matter. It could have been anything. What’s important is the rule itself. God said, don’t cross this line.
And of course they crossed it. I put this in your bulletin. But I appreciate how one writer, Walter Brueggeman, he says, our mistake is to pursue autonomous freedom. Freedom which does not discern the boundaries of human life, leaves us anxious. The attempt to resolve anxiety in our culture are largely psychological, economic, cosmetic.
They are bound to fail because they do not approach the cause. This is fallen humanity. This is our culture. We demand autonomous freedom by everyone. We want to do what we want to do with no consequence.
And yet none of us can pay the psychological debt it produces, let alone the moral guilt we accumulate.
Adam and Eve got what they wanted. Their eyes were open. Verse 7. But what did they get? What did they see?
They saw that they were naked. There’s a sense of shame before one another. And they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloth. And when asked by the Lord, Adam tells him, I was afraid because I was naked. I hid myself.
And this further questioning that takes place. The first man, the man who, when he first saw his wife and beautiful poetry broke out in chapter two, he said, this is a last bone of my bone, in flesh of my flesh. He knew, now moves from being a husband and protector to an accuser. He says, the woman whom you gave me, she gave Me of the fruit of the tree and I ate. He accuses both her, and of course he accuses God.
He says, it’s not my fault. He pulls them both down in order to lift himself up. That is the sin at his core. I justify myself at your expense. We do that all the time.
We could do it individually. The problems you. The problems you, or the problems them, they over there. If. If we could just get rid of those people, we would be so much better off.
As if the problem is out there rather than right here in my own heart.
And Adam is putting the blame elsewhere. And we see this continues this wonderful helper of Adam, Eve, the one who was refined and fashioned by the Lord to image him. This drive for interpersonal, interdependent relationships. She passes the buck too. The serpent deceived me and I ate.
The woman was created as a helper and a mother. Both of these two wonderful attributes are now fractured. Suffering comes from eternity. And in their relationships, you see, in verse 16, God spoke to the woman and said, I will surely multiply your chain. Pain and childbearing.
In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you. Or, as one writer put it, to love and to cherish has become to desire and to dominate. And then to Adam, he said, because you’ve eaten this, cursed is the ground. Because of you in pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles shall sprout up, and you’ll eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat it till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
That’s the nature of sin, what it has brought down to humanity. One writer, he put it this way. He said, the woman’s punishment struck at the deepest root of her being as a wife and a mother. And the man strikes at his innermost nerve of light, his work, his activity, provision for sustenance.
The body of the man and the body of the woman were expressions of who they were as persons. They were persons, not animals. And through sin they are often more animal like. They were called to subdue the earth, and instead they were subdued by it, and to dust they shall return. They are naked and ashamed and afraid.
First, John tells us, perfect love casts out fear, and instead they had cast out perfect love with fear as the result. You hide and you cover. When you no longer trust another person. We hide ourselves from others. We cover ourselves with curated image.
We want others to see of us what we want them to think we are. So we curate very carefully those crafted images. And as we go forward in Genesis, all this is played out through humanity in profound relational brokenness. One of the great beauties of scripture is that nothing is sanitized. It is a holy book that speaks of very unholy people.
Genesis 4 We move from the hidden murder of Abel to the open and boasting murder of Lamech, who now takes two wives for himself. Genesis 6 There’s this sinful intermarrying taking place, the result of his great wickedness. Genesis 9 Noah’s son Ham sins against him in some way that includes Noah’s nakedness. Genesis 16 there’s this shame of Sarah’s barrenness and her heartache when Abraham takes a concubine to father a son.
Everywhere polygamy is mentioned in scripture. It’s never a good thing. Relational havoc is what we see. We see that with Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah, and on it goes. Genesis 19 the homosexuality of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah, where they try to rape the angelic messengers who come to save Abraham’s nephew lot.
Also. Genesis 19 there’s an incestuous relationship between Lot and his two daughters. Both Abraham and later his son Isaac lie about their wives, afraid of being killed. And Sarah and Rebecca are taken into a king’s harem because of it. Genesis 34 Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped and there’s a series of vengeful murders that result from it.
Genesis 35 Reuben, who’s Jacob’s firstborn son, sleeps with his father’s concubine and is later cursed because of it. Genesis 37 Judas son onan is killed by the Lord for sexual sin. Judah’s daughter in law Tamar, tricks him by dressing as a prostitute to sleep with him to have a child. Genesis 39 Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph to commit adultery. And we’re still in just the book of Genesis.
And all of this almost entirely. All these sins are through the promised line of Seth from the family line of Abraham, the one who’s called and chosen by God.
And we see the result.
God’s original intent for mutual relationships between men and women have been replaced by possession of the other as an object of one’s own lust and desire.
Mankind is once more alone, unable to give of himself as a gift to another, unable to be received as that gift. Shame, fear, mistrust have entered into God’s good creation. We cannot fully find ourselves in except through the giving of ourselves. That’s. That’s what we were made for.
To be most human means we must give of ourselves to others. We find that similar paradox when Jesus says, if you want to have life, we must be willing to give it away. That’s what we were created for. But as one pastor says, we have a capacities, powers, potentialities that are little more than an ache inside us because they were given us, that we might experience Almighty God, the Holy One, up close and intimately in a way that we do not now do. That inner desire for what we were made to be has been shattered.
Two sinners standing alone together, needing their sins atoned for.
Even in the midst of their sin, the Lord is making provision. They cannot remove their shame, but he can. They have proved to be faithless, but he is faithful. He mercifully comes to them and he finds the ones who are hidden. And in the conversation that takes place, the unfolding of what was happened.
He. The Lord speaks to the serpent. And he says this in verse 15. I will put enmity or hatred between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
And here we have what’s referred to as the first expression of the Gospel. Notice that there’s a future war between two lines of people, those pursuing God and those pursuing the way of the serpent. The battle will culminate in a showdown between he singular shall strike your head and you singular shall strike his heel. So what’s referred to in the plural as is war, we find culminating in two people, two persons battling this out Christian, the Lord and the great serpent.
And then a little further down in the text, we get this, this note of hope. And then in verse 21, cryptically, even it says, and the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them. An odd note. Adam and Eve already have made for themselves coverings of leaves, but God now provides clothes or coverings from animal skins. That’s highly significant.
What Adam and Eve provided was not enough. It was insufficient to cover their shame and their nakedness. Francis Schaeffer put it this way. He said, man cannot stand before God in his own covering. He needs a covering provided for by God.
They cannot deal with their shame, their brokenness and sin, but God can. They need a specific kind of covering, one which would require sacrifice and death. It would cost an innocent life, innocent blood, for this type of clothing. A life must suffer the violence of death to furnish it. And this is a foreshadowing of the entire work of salvation given in just a small verse.
We see it in chapter four, Abel’s offering up from the flock of his herd animal sacrifice to the Lord. We see that when Noah comes out of the ark, some of the clean animals are offered up to the Lord. From the beginning we see that the covering of sin, it costs something. It’s intimately linked to the shedding of sacrificial blood. That word in the New Testament to speak of this is propitiation.
Romans 3:25. A big word just means removal of wrath through sacrifice, atonement, covering. And that’s going to culminate with Christ being stricken, the serpent being crushed under his heel. Adam failed. Romans 5, Paul says explicitly, adam failed.
And Jesus is called by Paul as the last Adam. In First Corinthians 15, the first man, Adam, became a life, a living being. The last Adam became a life giving spirit, a life giving spirit. For an Adam. All die, but in Christ shall all be made alive.
It’s not surprising that immediately after Christ’s baptism by John, what takes place next? He’s taken into the wilderness. He tempted. He’s tempted by the devil, the father of lies. He comes to Jesus to tempt him, even as the first Adam was tempted.
Revelation 12 tells us the great dragon was cast out, the serpent of old, called the devil, Satan, who deceives the world. Jesus is the true Israel of God. Where Adam failed, he succeeds. The tables are turned. Through his perfect obedience, through his sacrificial death, sin is atoned for and life now enters back into the children of Adam.
We look and we see a broken landscape. Eden is undone, sin warring and raging in our own flesh. Then we look to the cross, to another broken body, the body of Christ. He is the one who is now naked before the world. But Hebrews tells us that he despises the shame of the cross.
He’s not overcome by it, he wars against it. He despises it because it is he who crushes the head of the serpent under his feet. Paradise is regained, though not yet fully realized. In Romans 8, Paul reminds us. He says, we know the whole creation is groaning together in the pains of childbirth.
Until now, not only creation, but we ourselves. We have the first fruits of the Spirit. We groan inwardly as we await for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved. That’s why we call it good news.
This is the undoing of the fall, the undoing of the sin and rebellion.
Because the serpent is still at work, blackmailing us with the Whispers that he tells us, oh, if other people knew what you did, what’s been done to you, if everybody else could know the thoughts in your heart, if they could see this right now, no one would want to be around you.
If your sins are known, you’re going to be alone.
And what we see is that our sins are common to humanity.
There’s nothing special or unique about our sins. They’re terrible in the same way that has been terrible for centuries, thousands and thousands of years.
Our sins are common, but our forgiveness is glorious. It’s uncommon.
We have been clothed in the righteousness of Christ.
We see the beautiful symbolism coming all the through scripture that there, there needs to be an undoing, a covering of our sins. How is that to be performed? It comes through sacrifice, comes through death. It comes through atoning blood from the very headwaters of creation till now. And we see that fulfilled in the personal work of Jesus, the last Adam, and comes to undo what the first Adam brought us all into.
That we can receive his righteousness. That we can be washed clean, our shame in our guilt removed. That you can stand even before the great accuser and say, yep, that was me. Yep, those things, those are all true of me. But thanks be to God, that’s not the end of the story.
Because Jesus has redeemed me from an empty way of life. He has redeemed me for my own sins. He has redeemed me even from the shame that others have cast upon me.
You can accuse me all day long, but I stand redeemed by Jesus.
He has purchased me.
And I, and you with the rest of God’s people are awaiting that day when one day we will be fully restored to what that means. But even now, we know substantially that redemption and that redemption has gone into our families, it has gone into our relationship. It brings into those places that were wastelands of death we now see life bringing forth. We are not trapped by those things. We’re not to be identified by those things any longer.
We have a new name given to us. We are a new people.
The sin that’s in here is the dominant problem that I have. It’s not out there.
It’s. It’s me, it’s you. And Jesus comes to say, I am the solution for that.
Come to me, you who are heavy laden and weary, and I will give you rest. We don’t have to hide anymore. We don’t have to try to cover ourselves with curated images of what we want other people to think that we are. We can now freely be who God has called us to be as a forgiven and redeemed people.
Creation, fall, redemption. I encourage you to come this evening as we look at that in our vesper service, to rejoice in that. To sit and contemplate the beauty and the wonder of all that Jesus has done for us. We are no longer blackmailed by our sins by an accuser. We stand set free by a glorious redeemer.
Pray with me. Father Almighty, we do thank you and praise you that you have given to us life, life in your son. Lord God, you have seen our sin, you have seen our hearts and you have not turned away from us. Father, we all stand broken, sinful and rebellious before you. And yet you have brought your son into the world to redeem us, to save us.
Thank you, Father. We pray that you would continue bringing the healing balm of Jesus good news to the deep scars of our own sin. And Father, I would ask to Lord if they’re in here who do not know you, who have not known the liberation, the freedom of Christ. Father, I pray that you would set them free, that you would open their eyes to see, to see life in your son. Freedom from sin, the removal of stain.
We bless you this day. You are good and you are mighty. God, we pray all these things through Christ our blessed Savior. Amen. Amen.
And.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.