Sin: The Fall

[0:00] We've broken it down into five words. One is the word creation, sin, covenant, kingdom, and fulfillment. And we've talked about God being the creator of the spirit world, God being the creator of the material world, God being the creator of man and all the gifts that he's given to man.

[0:19] And today we come to sin and particularly the fall, what's known as the fall. Beginning in Genesis chapter 3, verse 1, hear the word of the Lord.

[0:34] Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, Indeed, has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?

[0:46] The woman said to the serpent, From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said you shall not eat from it or touch it or you will die.

[1:01] The serpent said to the woman, You surely will not die. For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.

[1:13] When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate.

[1:24] And she gave also to her husband with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

[1:35] They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you?

[1:48] And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

[2:01] The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this you have done?

[2:11] And the woman said, The serpent deceived me and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field.

[2:24] On your belly you will go and dust you will eat all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. And he shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the hill.

[2:39] To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children. Yet your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.

[2:51] Then to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying you shall not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you.

[3:03] In toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you. And you will eat the plants of the field. And by the sweat of your face you will eat bread till you return to the ground.

[3:16] Because from it you were taken. For you are dust and to dust you shall return. Now the man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living.

[3:28] The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now he might stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.

[3:43] Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So he drove the man out. And at the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword, which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.

[4:01] Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that you in your sovereignty have given to us this perfect record of the beginning of sin. this real history that we know because you have given it to us is how we ought to think and believe.

[4:20] And I pray, Lord, that you would convict us where we believe wrongly. You would convict us where we do not hold to the truth. And that you would help us, Father, help us please to know, to hear, to accept, and to believe the truth of what you teach us from your word.

[4:36] Lord, we pray, Father, that you would so work in us that we would not just believe, but we would have hope.

[4:50] And we would have hope. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen. To err is human, and to forgive is divine.

[5:01] Written by Alexander Pope in one of his essays. But a lot of people have taken that phrase and turned it and gone a little different direction than perhaps what he meant.

[5:12] And they've turned it into sort of an excuse for our behavior, an excuse for not being perfect, not being righteous as we should, that to err is human. It almost sounds as though by nature, the way God created us, he created us sort of broken, already sinning.

[5:30] But that is not what Scripture teaches. In Ecclesiastes 7.29, it says that God made men upright. So there was a fall. So to err is not human.

[5:44] To err is sinful, fallen human. But our original creation is that we were upright, but we have fallen.

[5:55] In other words, you can take a look at the world around you, and you can see all of the bad that is there. And you have to ask yourself the question, why is it there?

[6:07] A lot of different worldviews attempt to answer the question, why, but none can answer it the way the Bible does. And for us to really have hope in this world, we need to understand what this fall is.

[6:21] So I'm going to explain it in three points. One is the fall. The next is the consequence. And the last is going to be the hope. The fall occurs in verses 1 through 6.

[6:33] And in verses 1 through 6, we begin with a question from Satan. He questions, and the question has to do with what can you eat? And the way he forms this question is that you can't eat from anything, can you?

[6:47] Now, if you were here last week, you know automatically that from last week, God actually gave a command that says you can eat from everything. You can eat from everything. And so already in this question, Satan is bringing some form of doubt into the mind of Eve as he's telling her, you can't eat from anything, can you?

[7:07] She answers, and her answer is such that we can eat from anything, but then she goes on to say that we cannot eat from the tree that's in the middle of the garden, and then she adds something to it.

[7:19] She says, or even touch it. Now, I don't know where she got this. I don't know where she added this, you cannot touch it. Maybe she added it because Adam told her, hey, we're not supposed to eat from that tree, and maybe she thought to herself, she's not going to touch it.

[7:35] My actually favorite idea is that Adam looked at her and said, okay, woman, don't eat from that tree and don't you even touch it. I can't prove that, but I think that might be possible.

[7:48] So she's not really reporting God's word precisely, so this doubt has begun to sort of creep in. Because here's what's important. What's important is that God has spoken and we either listen to him or we don't.

[8:04] So Satan goes on the attack against God's character. She says that if we eat it, if we touch it, we will die, and Satan says, you will not surely die. Just the exact opposite of what God has already said.

[8:19] You will not die. He is calling God a liar. Verse 5 tells us why he says this.

[8:31] And in Satan's words, what he's saying is that God is holding out on you. God knows that if you eat this, your eyes will be opened, you'll be like him, and he doesn't want that for you, so God is holding out on you.

[8:44] Satan has called the devil for a reason. The word devil means slanderer. So he's slandering God's name here. And so as Eve takes in what she's hearing, we find that in verse 6, that she sees that it is good for food.

[9:01] It's a delight to the eyes, and this tree is a desire to make one wise. So she eats. Here, if you'll remember, what we have is the perfect universe on the perfect earth with a perfect husband and a perfect marriage with a perfect job and a perfect home, and she throws it all away because she's listening not to the word of God but to the voice of Satan.

[9:33] And I know there's a lot of times that there's a lot of people who want to look at Eve because we look at the curses and we look at these things and we want to say, if I could go back, I would just tell her not to do that or I'd slap the apple out of her hand or maybe whatever you might think to yourself.

[9:49] But before we castigate Eve, we need to go to the depth of the wickedness of this whole thing. And to see that, we need to turn to the New Testament for just a moment because you'll have to understand that the New Testament, inspired by the Holy Spirit, much like the Old Testament, is a commentary, much of the time, on what the Old Testament means.

[10:11] And in Paul's writings in 1 Timothy chapter 2, as he's giving instructions about what is to happen in the formal gatherings of God's people in the worship service, he gives instructions but he gives reasons.

[10:24] Now, the instructions may offend you. And if they offend you, you're going to have to just get over it because this is the word of the Lord. The reasons for why he's saying this are the things that we must hold on to and the things we need to see for today.

[10:38] Verse 11, Paul says, a woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness in the formal gatherings of the church, that is. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man but to remain quiet.

[10:53] Why? Why, Paul? Verse 13, for it was Adam who was first created. That's the first reason because there is priority order in that.

[11:07] The second reason is verse 14, and it was not Adam who was deceived but the woman being deceived fell into transgression. So what Paul is saying is that he's giving commands for the local church in the gathering of the worship and the formal gathering of worship for the people of God.

[11:25] He has instructions for how that ought to be done and it's grounded in creation and it's grounded in the fall. So there's two things about that. Number one, if the creation didn't happen the way the Bible says and the fall didn't happen the way the Bible says, then you need to throw the whole Bible away.

[11:42] Let's go home and let's be done. Because either it's all true or it's not true. And that is the stand you have to take. The second thing is, is that Paul is giving us a glimpse into Eve's fall here that she was deceived.

[12:05] When she ate the fruit, she really believed God was holding out on her. She really believed that it would make her wise.

[12:16] She really believed that it would be good to eat this forbidden fruit because she was deceived. Now she's still responsible for her deception. But she was deceived.

[12:29] Now my point is, if we go back and we take a look at what's there in 1 Timothy 2, verse 14, there's something maybe you missed.

[12:44] Adam was not deceived. And if you go back to Genesis chapter 3, verse 6, that when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took of the fruit, she ate it, then she also gave to her husband with her.

[13:14] And he ate. Remember, this is the temple of God. The Garden of Eden is a temple of God. And there, Adam is the priest king of this creation.

[13:28] He is the chief image bearer of God. It is his job to make sure that the earth is filled with the glory of God. And he was with her and so he heard what was spoken to his wife.

[13:41] He heard her become deceived because he was with her. He saw her reach her hand out to take a piece of the fruit to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because he was with her.

[13:53] And like a billiard ball, he remained passive, unengaged, quiet, as his wife did the one thing forbidden that was going to kill her. And he didn't do it because he was deceived.

[14:06] Because he knows that God is good. He knows that God is not holding out on them. He knows this tree is wrong. He knows it's going to bring death and destruction. He knows that Satan is a liar and yet what does he do?

[14:18] He reaches out and he grabs the fruit and he eats it in utter, complete, entire rebellion against God. God. This is a description of the original sin.

[14:48] This is the fall. This is Adam and Eve. And every time, every time I preach on this, I'm just overwhelmed at the spectacle that that is for him to be so brazen.

[15:17] I mean, you have everything. You've got this relationship with God in which he walks in the cool of the evening.

[15:31] You've got a perfect wife with a perfect marriage and a perfect home with a perfect job. And thumbing his nose at God, he eats this is why our world is so messed up.

[15:54] What happens in Genesis chapter 5 is that as the story progresses in verse 1 and 2, we're given this reminder that God created man in his image. But in verse 3, we're told that Adam lived 130 years and became the father of a son in his own image.

[16:12] It's very important to see that because as Adam and Eve were directly without any intervention made by God, created by God in God's image, every one of us thereafter, we are made not immediately, but we're made by procreation.

[16:35] And now his son is made after the image of Adam, fallen Adam, ruined Adam, rebellious Adam.

[16:48] And what this means is that every single one of us, because we inherit from our forefathers, we have inherited both the guilt and the corruption of Adam's sin.

[17:01] We've inherited the guilt. The guilt is that we're guilty for breaking that law. He was our representative and what he did counts for us. So we have his guilt upon us.

[17:14] The wages of sin is death. If you don't believe that we've inherited his guilt, then why do we even die? But we've not just inherited the corruption, the guilt, we've inherited the corruption.

[17:31] You basically can think of it this way. We are sinners first and we sin. We are not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we're sinners.

[17:42] We are something and we do something. We've inherited the guilt and the corruption from Adam. And here's the thing. Read Romans chapter 5 verse 12 and following because there's some people that don't like this idea that I'm talking about.

[17:57] They say, oh, no, we've not inherited anything from Adam. But here's the thing. Paul makes the argument that we were in Adam and therefore lost or we could be in Christ and therefore have life.

[18:08] So if you don't want to inherit sin from Adam, then you cannot have life from Christ. It's an all or nothing kind of thing. And this is exactly why Jesus came to this world because of this fall, because we've inherited the guilt and corruption.

[18:25] He came to take the punishment for us so we might be set free and be found in him, the second Adam, and not Adam, the first. That is the fall.

[18:41] Let's take a look at the consequences. I'm going to be all over the place between verse 7 and verse 19 in this because I'm putting it together in a little bit different way. Talk about the consequences between Adam and Eve first and for Adam and Eve and then the consequences between them and God.

[18:58] First of all, there are consequences between Adam and Eve. You can see in verse 7 the very first thing that they do. They've not been sinners but just for a few seconds. And they grab fig leaves and they sow them because they're ashamed to be in front of one another.

[19:13] The shame of their sin, the shame of the nakedness, now they can't be unashamed in front of one another. Now they have to hide from one another. So they sow together their own fig leaves.

[19:26] Then you can see the curses upon Eve. pain in childbirth is greatly multiplied. So there was a moment at which childbirth would not have been so painful. And one of the things that this should do in our minds is that with every wave of pain that comes, you sit there, you time them, right?

[19:46] Every wave of pain that comes should have yelled out and screamed out to us, you've rebelled, you've rebelled, you've rebelled, you've rebelled. It goes on to say that her desire would be for her husband.

[20:00] Now this is not connected to bearing children, but it's connected to the second phrase, ruling over you. This word desire means to have mastery over.

[20:12] It means to have mastery over. In Genesis chapter 4 verse 7, Cain has given his offering, he is not accepted, and he is angry, and so God speaks to Cain in verse 7, and he says, if you do well, will not your countenance be lifted?

[20:26] And if you do not do well, sin is crouching out the door, and its desire is for you, but you must master it. So when we go back to Genesis chapter 3 verse 16, when it says that the woman's desire will be for her husband, what it's saying is that she's going to desire to take the lead.

[20:46] She's going to desire to rule and reign over her husband. She's going to want to take the control of everything, that the curse is that she wants to be in charge. But then it says that he will rule over you, and this is not the kind of rulership that you see in Ephesians chapter 5, when it talks about wives being submissive to husbands and husbands loving wives.

[21:10] This word here is the idea of a tyrannical rule. It's the idea of a man who is wicked and ugly and vicious and mean. And so the curse is that marriage is going to be harmed greatly because the wife is not going to want to keep her place and the man is not going to keep his place in any kind of way that represents God.

[21:37] But there's curses upon the man as well. It says cursed is the ground. Cursed is the ground. ground is cursed. In Romans chapter 8 verse 20 it says that the world is subjected to futility.

[21:52] What that means is that the world is going to become cursed. The reason we have hurricanes, the reason we have tornadoes, the reasons we have diseases, the reasons animals attack is because this world is a cursed place.

[22:06] Every single part of it. There's not a single part of it that is uncursed. It is all cursed. It's all against man.

[22:17] Matter of fact, his work is going to be unproductive and difficult. I mean, there was a time that he could tend the garden, he could walk through, he could grab from a tree without any problem whatsoever and eat, but now he's got to cultivate the ground and he's got to eat from what he does and the ground is going to give him thorns and thistles instead of the fruit that he's working so hard for.

[22:36] Beloved, this is the thing. Right here is the core. This is the source. This is the fountainhead of all the relationship troubles that we have in life. This is rubber meets the road kind of stuff.

[22:49] This is why there's so much trouble in marriage. This is why there's so much trouble in parenting. Why there's so much trouble in our jobs and our finances. When two people get married, what they need to understand is that you have two sinners who are getting married.

[23:06] people respond sinfully to being sinned against. I would say it this way.

[23:18] I know that there may be some situations outside of and be caveats of what I'm about to say. There's the potential for that. But by and large, I should always say about my marriage and any marriage troubles that are going on, I'm the biggest problem in my marriage.

[23:39] So the relationship between the two of them was damaged. But then the relationship between them and God. I mean, in verse 8 through 13, as God comes into the cool of the day and he begins to walk through the garden, he's coming to see them.

[23:51] They run and they hide among the trees. Now, why do they hide among the trees? My brother and I, we had gotten a remote control airplane from my grandfather.

[24:06] It was supposed to be built out of balsa wood and like wrapped with animal skin and gold. I mean, it was this crazy thing. He gave two, I'm like third grade, my brother is like sixth grade.

[24:16] I don't know why in the world my grandfather gave it to us because we were not going to treat this thing well. I mean, it was just going to be bad. It was just, it was a get, we were way too young for it.

[24:27] But it had a battery with it. You know, it had one of those one and a half volt batteries, you know, the ones I'm talking about. They're like this and like this, got the two posts on it. And about this time, rechargeable batteries had started hitting the market, you know.

[24:39] So my brother and I are home alone. So, so he takes a couple of wires and wraps it around the post and says, okay, Brady, we're going to try this thing out, see if we can recharge it.

[24:54] Have his third, fourth grade. So just bear with me here. So he says, take those wires and just put it in the outlet right there. Three things happened.

[25:12] Number one, there was this massive flame that went up the wall. It was just a quick flash. Then my brother runs out of the house because my parents are driving down the driveway.

[25:26] So I rushed to the kitchen to grab a paper towel and I wiped this black soot off the wall, throw it away, and I run as well. Why did we run?

[25:38] We didn't want to get in trouble. We were afraid to face our parents. You see, that's the way humanity is in Romans chapter 1, verse 18 and following tells us that all people know that God exists.

[25:51] even those who are atheistic, even those of a different religion, they know the God of the Bible exists and yet what do they do? They suppress that truth by their unrighteousness. So here's Adam and Eve in the garden suppressing the truth that God's there running to go hide behind a tree like that's really going to do something.

[26:10] And then God places in verse 24 the cherubim, an angel and a flaming sword there to guard the entrance. He's doing that to keep them from coming and getting life.

[26:21] In other words, life is to be found but life is now guarded. Now there's a separation between God and man and you can't come this way because if you come you will surely die. It's the same emblem that comes into the temple as they take and they decorate the holy of holies with angels and fire.

[26:38] You even see angels there upon the ark of the covenant. If anybody goes into that place they will die immediately. That's the whole point. God basically closes the way to come to him.

[26:53] The consequences of this fall is that we have been separated from God. But then there's hope.

[27:09] Now the hope comes in two ways. One, it comes as a promise. In verse 15, now the curse that God gives to the serpent is verse 14 and 15. But I want to concentrate on verse 15 because God says something here that's just astounding to me and I love this every time I read it.

[27:28] He says, I will put enmity. Okay, enmity is not a word that I walk around saying very much. I don't know about you but what does enmity mean? Enmity means to be enemies with.

[27:41] To be opposed to. To have hostility towards. So what he's saying, he's talking to the serpent, he's talking to Satan, he says, I'm going to put enmity, hostility between you and the woman.

[27:59] Okay? That's first level. We get that. There's going to be hostility. hostility. So why is he putting hostility between them? Because when she listened to the voice of the serpent, she came into allegiance with the serpent.

[28:15] That's what Ephesians chapter 2 is speaking about. We'll get there in a second. So he says, I'm going to separate you. You've joined together in this unholy alliance and I'm going to separate you.

[28:27] I myself, God, I'm going to be the one to bring the hostility. I'm going to be the one to separate the two of you. You serpent from you woman. Then he goes to the next level, right? Level 2.

[28:38] From your seed and her seed. So it's not just the sin bringer and the woman, but it's their offspring. He says, I'm going to create a hostility between the offspring of Satan and the offspring of the woman.

[28:53] There's going to be a holy war from here all the way out. So that there are only two kinds of people in the world. You're either a child of Satan or you're a child of the woman. That's what Genesis chapter 4 through 12 is showing us.

[29:09] That's the way it is today. There is not a single person on this planet who is neutral about God, about Christ. Neutrality is a myth.

[29:21] Jesus says, if you're not for me, you're against me. So he promises that not only will he bring hostility between the serpent and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring, then he does something astounding.

[29:35] And he, the woman's offspring, will crush your, the serpent, head. Not offspring crushing offspring, but offspring crushing source.

[29:51] promise. This is a promise that God himself, by an offspring of the woman, is going to declare war and is going to destroy the sin bringer.

[30:05] And in doing that, he will bring his people back to himself. This is what's called the proto-evangeligon. evangeligon. Oh, wow, my mouth just died on me.

[30:18] It's the first promise of the gospel. It's the first promise of the gospel. That God himself, by the offspring of the woman, the Lord Jesus Christ, will put an end to Satan.

[30:31] And that's exactly what he does. But not only do we see that in verse 15, this promise, but there's a sacrifice in this passage in verse 21. In verse 21, it says that the Lord God made skins for covering for Adam and Eve.

[30:51] Here they were, their guilt exposed, their guilt out there for the world to see. They tried to cover their guilt in their own way, doing their own thing, sewing their own fig leaves together to try to cover their guilt.

[31:07] But the only thing that could cover their guilt was the shedding of blood. And God himself shed the blood and used the skin of that animal to cover their guilt.

[31:22] You see, this is all getting to this big picture of what is the Bible all about. And even right here in chapter 3 of Genesis, we have the story of the Bible in a nutshell.

[31:33] And here's how we need to end this. Because what we need to do is we need to take this, all of this that we're talking about and bring it right home to us where we are. And one of the things that the Bible says in Romans chapter 3 is that there is none righteous, not even one.

[31:48] There is none who understands. There is none who seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they've become useless. There's none who does good. There's not even one.

[32:01] Every single one of us needs to understand that we are sinners. sinners. Now, you might be a Christian now, but if you're a Christian and at one time, this is you, right?

[32:12] And if you're not a Christian, then this is you, all humanity, sinners, lost before God, not seeking God, not walking after God. And in Romans chapter 8, it speaks about how the mindset of the flesh is death.

[32:25] And in verse 7, it says that the mindset of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God. Verse 8, it says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

[32:37] Here's the point. The point is, is that we've inherited this corruption, this guilt from Adam and Eve, and if we never change from that, if you just live your life the way you've lived it, and you've never been converted, you will end your life that way, and you will end your life in hell for all eternity.

[32:53] There's a boat ramp, if you will, and we are all on that boat ramp headed straight for hell. And only those who have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ get plucked up off the ramp.

[33:07] We've rebelled against God. We have not done things His way. And I know that you might think that you're a good person, but I just want you to think for just a second just how good you're not.

[33:21] Just use the Ten Commandments and just think about your own life. Have you ever told a lie? The commandment says that we should not bear false witness.

[33:33] If you've told a lie, then what does that make you? Makes you a liar. Have you ever stolen anything? Even something small? Yeah, what does that make you?

[33:49] A thief. It says we're not supposed to take the name of the Lord God in vain. You ever taken the Lord's name in vain before?

[34:01] Said it like OMG? Yeah, that makes you a blasphemer. It says you shall not murder.

[34:13] And Jesus says that if you're angry with your brother, you've committed murder. You ever been angry with somebody? And that makes you a murderer. That's a very unpleasant thing to think those thoughts.

[34:28] But you see, you can't have the cure for that if you're not willing to admit that you're a wicked, rotten, no-good scoundrel of a sinner that deserves death and hell. I mean, if I just come in here and I just tell you that you're a good person, you're okay, don't worry about it.

[34:45] That's like telling you, no, no, there's nothing coming, go ahead, cross the road when there's something that's coming. And so I don't want to do that to you.

[34:57] If you can't admit that you deserve nothing in this life but death and hell, then Jesus is of no benefit to you. He came to save and to seek that which was lost.

[35:08] Are you lost? Then you can be found. And there is hope. And God has done all the work for it. God has done all the people who do not deserve it and he does it without their help.

[35:24] He is the God who justifies the ungodly. He is the God who won't put out a smoldering wick or break a bruised reed. He's the God who sent his own son to take the punishment for us.

[35:41] And if you're not a Christian, then today I say to you, I beg you, trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. And if you are a Christian and you know that you've been translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of his dear son, you know that you've been washed in the blood, you know that if you were to die today, you would spend eternity in heaven because you've trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, repented of your sins, then I say to you, because of what we've seen, be grateful to the Lord that you're saved.

[36:09] and share the gospel with somebody else because they need to know the truth. Let's pray together.