[0:00] All right, we get to continue on in Genesis 3. I told you last week this is one of my favorite passages. There's so much to talk about and to look at, which we will only get to scratch the surface on. But we're going to continue it and look at the second half of this passage. So give your attention to God's Word from Genesis 3. We'll begin in chapter 8 or in verse 8. And then they, meaning Adam and Eve, 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 God among the trees of the garden. But 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.
[0:57] Because I was naked and I hid myself. God said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman you gave me to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent? He deceived me and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, above all the beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing.
[1:55] In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. And you shall eat of the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them. And then the Lord God said, behold the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach out his hand and also take of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had taken. He drove out the man and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim in a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the tree of life. The way to the tree of life. Friends, this is God's word and he gives it to you because he loves you and he wants you to know him. I told you last week that I was going to talk about Barbie because I thought Barbie was a really interesting, the Barbie movie was a really interesting commentary on Genesis chapter 3. Not so much a commentary but an interaction with. What do they have to do with one another? I think Greta Gerwig who is the director of Barbie is doing an intentional job of trying to play off of the themes of Genesis. I mean you see it just from the very beginning. At the very beginning of the movie you have this voice in the beginning
[4:03] Barbie was created and it's this allusion to Genesis. And then you have Barbie land which is kind of a garden of Eden. This perfect place where things seem to work out fine. And then you have Ken and Barbie and they're kind of like a reversal of Adam and Eve in some way. But there's far more than just illusions. The Barbie movie is attempting to deal with some of the issues that we all experience.
[4:34] They're attempting to, Ken and Barbie are, they're having an existential crisis. That's really what they're doing. They're both trying to figure out what it means to be a man and a woman and how they are to relate to one another. I think the reason why the movie was so popular, it grossed over a billion dollars I think, why it was so popular, why it captured attention and resonated with a lot of people is because it articulates some of the conflict that all of us experience living as men and women in our, in the common culture that we all live in. You know for women there was a, there was an extended monologue by Barbie goes to the real world, not Barbie land. And she encounters, I should just say, they're, they're number one, they're going to be spoilers, but I warned you about it. So I don't feel bad. Second, if you haven't seen this, it's pretty easy to pick up. There's, you know, it's not, this is not rocket science here. So, but Barbie goes to the real world and in the real world, there's a woman there, a real mother who kind of tries to articulate some of what it means to be a woman. She says this, she says like, we always have to be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say that you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the time. These conflicts that I think many women resonate with, the expectations of who they're supposed to be seem to be in conflict all the time. Ken is dealing with his own set of internal contradictions. Ken spends the entire movie, everything Ken is doing is to try to get Barbie's attention. He even goes so far as to sing a Matchbox 20 song with his guitar on the beach with a bonfire, which of course every woman should swoon for. But Ken gets nothing from Barbie. Everything in Ken's life is directed towards getting Barbie's attention, and she doesn't care at all. See, the movie is interesting because the movie drops you right down in the midst of the conflict between men and women that we all live in.
[6:59] The problem is it doesn't give us a ton of answers. In fact, I think they would have done well if they had seen how Genesis 3 actually does answer some of the problems that the movie is bringing up.
[7:10] Questions of, how did it get this way? Could it ever get any better? Do we have any hope that there is any way through this? I think there is. I want to walk through the latter part of Genesis 3.
[7:23] I want to give you four parts, and I want to see how it engages some of the things that are going on in that movie. The first part is this, that sin inverts creation. Sin inverts creation. It turns it on its head. Let's just recap the story for just a second. Adam and Eve were created by God. They were placed in the garden. They had everything that they needed. It was a place of abundance. Adam and Eve had everything they could possibly need. God made Adam and Eve the same, but different. What was their difference? Is it because they're male and female? Well, not so much. It's more about the priority of their creation. Adam was created first, and then Eve came along next. Like two siblings of loving parents, both of them are beloved, but that birth order creates a different set of expectations, different set of responsibilities for Adam and Eve. So we get in the Bible that Adam and Eve are the same, and yet they are different in ways. Despite that difference, they were made for one another.
[8:33] They were made to have intimacy with one another, to be united together. In fact, even in their work that they were to do, they were to do their work together. They were to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. They were to be God together. They were to be God's representatives in the entire earth. Everything was how God designed. If I had a whiteboard, I would diagram it this way.
[8:58] There was God first, and then He created Adam, and then there was Eve, and together Adam and Eve were over all of the animals, over all the creation. But the serpent tempted Eve, right? We talked about that last week. Instead of abundance, Adam and Eve saw only what was forbidden. They assumed that God was holding out on them, that there was more that they could get, that they wanted more out of their world. They wanted to control. They wanted to determine their own outcomes without reference to God.
[9:34] And so instead of intimacy, they fell into sin. They retreated into shame and alienation. You remember the way that immediately they start to blame one another. We read this just a second ago. Look at verse 13. Well, verse 11, who told you you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you? And Adam's first response when caught in his sin is verse 12, the woman you gave me to be with me.
[10:03] She's the one who gave me the food, and I ate it. It's not my fault. It's her fault. And then to the woman, he says, what is this that you have done? And the woman blame shifts the other way. The serpent you gave me. They're both doing this. They're both blame shifting. Instead of unity and intimacy, they're dealing with God as individuals in shame and alienation and fear. See, so quickly, what God had created has become inverted, right? Instead of God determining things for Adam and for Eve together to overseeing the animals, what has happened? It's flipped on its head, right?
[10:44] Now you have a serpent who is telling Eve what she needs to really have as priority. Eve is now directing things for Adam, and Adam is now telling God what his problems really are.
[10:56] The world has turned on its head. See, Genesis 3 is the story of how Adam and Eve's sin inverts the created order, turning it all upside down. This is similar to what Barbie and Ken experience when they go from Barbie land into the real world. Everything's suddenly different. See, sin has inverted the way that this world. You don't work right. Your interior world doesn't work right. Your relationship with other men and women doesn't work right. This world doesn't work. And you know what?
[11:42] The beautiful thing about the Barbie movie and what's so helpful about it is that Greta Gerwig intuitively feels that this world doesn't work. And she's asking the question, why? Why doesn't it work? It should work. I love this other human that I'm now married to. Why doesn't it work?
[12:04] Well, because of sin. So the first thing is sin inverts creation. Second, sin has cursed consequences. So God gave consequences. Traditionally, we've called these curses, you know, curses on the serpent and the woman and the man. But what's interesting is actually, as you dig into it, is that the only person that gets cursed, well, the only thing that gets cursed is the serpent in the ground. Adam and Eve do not get cursed. God is showing what would result from their disobedience. God is describing here.
[12:39] God is not saying it must be this way. He's saying that this is the way that it goes now. He's describing the world as it really is. So look at verse 14 with the serpent.
[12:53] Because you've done this, cursed are you above all livestock, above all the beasts of the field. On your belly you'll go and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity. I'm going to skip that. I'll come back to that. Dust all the days of your life. The serpent was cursed to walk on his belly. Now, it kind of makes you wonder, what was he doing if he wasn't already walking on his belly?
[13:15] What's going on with that? Scholars have wondered, actually, if this wasn't a snake as we understand it, but perhaps some other kind of reptile something, maybe a dragon? I don't know. That comes back up in Revelation 12 that we just read. You know, maybe there are dragons. I don't know. We actually don't really know exactly what that was, but either way, what we're told is because he was the most crafty of all the created animals, he is now going to be the most cursed. Because he had tempted the man who was made of dust to eat, he is now going to eat dust all the days of his life.
[13:57] Second, the woman, she, I will multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you'll bring forth children. Your desire will be for your husband and he'll rule over you. She'll have pain and toil in childbearing.
[14:11] Now, this is probably not talking about just simply the physical pain of childbirth. This is talking about the emotional and relational and, yes, physical pain of the entire process of mating, of conception, of pregnancy, of birth, of child rearing. That whole process is full of relational and physical and emotional pain. To the man, verse 17, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you'll eat of the ground all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it'll provide for you. You shall eat the plants of the field.
[14:58] By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you are taken, you are dust and to dust you will return. Pain and toil will come to Adam's work.
[15:11] It was his sin of eating that now he's going to have the pain of bringing forth his own food. In a sense, you could say that Eve, the woman, was now going to suffer pain in her role as a helper and as a mother. Adam was going to feel pain now in his work as a farmer and as a father.
[15:35] That sin has created cursed consequences. That's the second thing. Sin inverts creation, it creates cursed consequences. Third, sin creates conflict. Now I skipped over two details in these cursed consequences that I want to go back to. I'm going to pick up one right here, verse 16 with Eve.
[15:51] Look at what this says. I will put enmity, that means hatred, that's another word for hatred, between you and the woman, between the snake and the woman, between your offspring or your seed is the word there, your seed and her seed. He shall bruise or crush is the actual word there. He shall crush or he shall crush your head and you shall bruise his heel. What is that?
[16:24] You know what? I'm sorry. I skipped ahead of where I wanted to go. I wanted to get to, I wanted to, I did the serpent there. I wanted to go to 16. Sorry, your pain, I won't read it later when we get back to that piece. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. Your desire will be for your husband, he'll rule over you. There's two key words there. First one is your desire. Desire is going to come back up with Cain and Abel. What desire means here is the prompting towards evil. Eve has a prompting to grasp something from Adam. Her desire is for Adam. What is she desiring? She's desiring, she's desiring to grasp his affection and his attention, grasping his responsibilities that have been given to him from God, grasping power over him, grasping for control.
[17:18] You even see a hint of that in the fact that Eve is the one negotiating with the servant while Adam is chilling on the side. She's, Eve's desire, it says here, is going to be to rule and control and to dominate her husband. But how is Adam going to respond to that? He will rule over her. Rule is a negative word that describes mastery and lordship and domination. See what the dynamic is here? Man, woman is going to use whatever power is at her disposal to control and to grasp affection from and to grab responsibility from her husband and the man is going to respond back with his physical and economic and otherwise power to dominate her. You see what the dynamic here is? See the consequence of this inverted and cursed creation is that woman would idolize affection from her husband and the man would idolize domination. You see what you've got here is you've got a major battle going on.
[18:34] Now if that doesn't describe the history of the battle between the sexes, I don't know what does. You see people sometimes when they get really angry about the situation between man and woman, even in our country, will look back at this male-dominated world and say it's because of teaching like the Bible that have created this. But that's not true. What's created the situation in which every one of us is born into and which we live is the power of sin. And what God is saying here is He's describing for you what it actually feels like to have sin change the way that you are meant to relate to the other sex. See the power of sin is so destructive that it has made this world one in which there is a constant battle for supremacy and power at the heart of how women relate. That is the thing that is at the heart of every marriage as well. It's an issue of power. Women using their power of influence and affection, using their power for influence and affection, men using their power for physical and economic domination. See, here's what's great about Barbie is that Greta Gerwig recognizes this. She recognizes that fundamentally there is conflict in that male and female dynamic.
[20:03] You remember when Ken went back to the real world? He discovered that actually, in contrast to Barbie land, the real world is a place that is dominated by what? Men and horses. Not sure why horses, but it's pretty great. And he begins to realize that the world is actually dominated by men. And Ken thinks it's amazing. And so he picks up all these ideas. He buys books about trucks and horses, and he buys furs for himself. And he picks up all the things of patriarchy, and he brings them back to Barbie land. And he takes over Barbie's Barbie house, and he makes it into what he calls his Mojo Dojo Casa house, which I just think is amazing. And the Mojo Dojo Casa house is this, like, man cave that is filled with big screen TVs that have sports and the Godfather on all the time. And they have mini fridges filled with beer that he's convinced the Barbies to give to him. And what's fascinating, though, is it's not just that
[21:10] Ken wants to be in control of the Barbie house. Ken, when Barbie returns and discovers that her house has been taken over, what he does is he walks out and he says to her, this is Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa house. This is not Barbie's Mojo Dojo Casa house anymore. How does it feel to be left out? It feels bad, doesn't it? See, what Ken was doing was reasserting his dominance. He was controlling the situation.
[21:44] And what did the rest of the movie was about the Barbies reasserting their control over Barbie land. See, the vision for Greta Gerwig was in a world, in the real world, it's dominated by men.
[21:57] Now we have Barbie land that is dominated by Barbie. But for her, she couldn't see past this vision of who gets the power. Either Barbie's in control or Ken's in control. She has no ability to see past that fundamental thing, which goes right back to Genesis 3, which is the fundamental problem is man and woman are constantly battling for dominance and supremacy. She's unable to provide a vision for anything more than power. And the reality is, that's what we already observe. That's what we see in Genesis 3, and it's cursed. You don't have to pay attention very long in our own culture to see how cursed the relationship between men and women is. Just look at the statistics that, you know, a woman is assaulted by a man every 10 minutes in our country. See, this is why Nancy Piercy, this book that I referenced last week, but I'll hold up again, The Toxic War on Masculinity, I thought it was really helpful. And I said last week, she has these competing visions she talks about of the good man and the real man, right? The good man is, good men are characterized by honor and duty and integrity. They're willing to sacrifice. They're responsible and generous. They provide for and they protect the weak. Real men, on the other hand, are tough and strong and aggressive and competitive and unwilling to show weakness. They're unemotional. They're imposing. They're isolated. They're self-made. See, the real man is a vision.
[23:43] The real man is a vision that is rooted in power and domination. See, it sounds more like a curse to me. You know, it might surprise you that the way that we think about male-female relationships is actually a fairly new phenomenon. Did you know that up until about the Civil War period, at least in the Western world, Europe and America, until the Civil War era, men were thought to be the morally superior sex? We tend to think of men as being the slouches and the luscious who need the sanctifying influence of a female, but that's actually opposite of what it was for hundreds of years. For hundreds of years, women were thought to be unchaste and in need of the moral influence of man.
[24:35] It was taught to men that women were going to be the ones that were going to be the moral undoing of them, the temptress kind of idea. Now, see, that's flipped. See, we have these deep narratives about men and women that are floating through our culture that we have to clue into and to see what's going on.
[25:00] Right now, we have a very toxic way of talking about masculinity. Just being a man is somehow seen as being less than. We desperately need to provide our boys and young men with a vision of heroic masculinity, as a writer named Caitlin Flanagan talks about in an article. I've linked to this on the website. You know, what she says is a heroic masculinity is a masculinity that is strong enough to dominate, but it's only used to sacrifice for the good of others. Strong and yet sacrificial.
[25:42] You see, it's so difficult to resist the cultural narratives that our culture is giving us, both for masculinity and femininity. That's what's so powerful about this Barbie movie.
[25:53] But the problem is, is so often what ends up happening is we in the church, we tend to take on these cultural narratives and we talk about what a man should be and a woman should be, and we end up using our own cultural categories and the things that we liked about our mama, or we liked about our daddy, or the things we think ought to be that are not actually rooted in biblical truth.
[26:20] You know, even well-meaning Christians mistakenly call their man-made visions biblical, and the stakes are really high. That's why we need some books like this. If you want to dig into this, if you're working with young people, I think this would be a really helpful book for you, and I can't possibly trace out everything that we need to talk about in just a few minutes here.
[26:42] But see, when we tell young men that they image God in simply their aggression and their dominance, then they begin to see themselves and women and even God as objects that need to be conquered.
[26:59] In the same way, when we tell our young women that they image God by controlling the men in their lives for their own good, you know, you can be the sanctifier of these men, then they're going to be confused.
[27:15] Is it any wonder that both Ken and Barbie are in this deep existential crisis? We're telling them there's a problem, which is obvious, and we're not giving them any solution to how to solve it.
[27:28] It wasn't always this way. It doesn't have to be this way, and it will not ultimately be this way. That's where the fourth thing comes in, that there is some hope here, that sin will be crushed.
[27:41] I read a minute ago the curse to the serpent. It's a really cryptic passage, verse 15. The seed or the descendants of the serpent are going to be crushed by the seed or the descendants of the woman. Now, the seed, the serpent and the woman represent two lines of humanity, and they have descendants, these seeds. The line of the serpent is the line of those who are in rebellion to God. The line of the woman are those who are God's people, part of His redemptive plan.
[28:15] In fact, one way that we can look at all of history is to see that there is a constant conflict between the line of the serpent and the line of the woman in conflict with one another.
[28:26] But at the end of those lines, what we're told is that there are two figures, the seeds. Now, it changes from descendants, multiple, to the seeds. Third person, masculine, singular.
[28:40] The person. This is the conflict we read about in Revelation 12, as is pictured in John's, in this vision that he has, that throughout the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the seed.
[28:58] Most scholars see this prediction in Genesis chapter 3, the third page of the Bible, that God is already predicting that He is going to bring a heroic end to this conflict.
[29:11] with the serpent. That one will come, who we know as Jesus, who will crush the head of the serpent and bring an end to the conflict that is there. The conflict of this world isn't going to last forever.
[29:25] And that's really the answer. That's the beginning point of understanding how we should think about these male-female relationships. See, Jesus arrives as the hero who is strong enough to destroy the works of the devil, and yet, what He uses His strength for is to sacrifice Himself for the life of His people.
[29:46] Natalie and I have this little drawing that we framed, and we got it. It's a drawing called Mary Consoles Eve. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's a picture that this, it's actually a nun who lives in Iowa who drew this a number of years ago. And it's a picture of Eve standing with her fig leaves and a snake wrapped around her leg. And she's standing face to face with Mary, who's with her pregnant belly. And Eve is touching the belly, touching Mary's belly. And the title of it is that Mary consoles Eve. Eve is now living in a world that is fundamentally different than the world that she was made to live in. She's dealing with the consequences of her own rebellion and sin against God.
[30:47] And Mary is showing her the hope that she has that a hero is going to come. You see, this passage shows us what it looks like to have male and females who are redeemed and reflecting God's image for them. You know, on the one hand, you have Adam who is going to ultimately, through the seat of the woman, the second Adam is going to come. Jesus is going to come who shows us what masculinity ought to look like, a victorious, heroic masculinity that is strong and powerful and yet is given for the service of the weak, that sacrifices himself, that never seeks his own way, but constantly seeks the good of other people, never for his own benefit. And you see in Eve and her seed coming ultimately into Jesus, but pictured with Mary as the one who bears out the hero, who enables the hero to come, who provides the context for that, both of them playing a part in our redemption.
[31:57] And so we need to figure out how to talk about men and women who reflect that redemptive vision. You know, one of the things that statistics will show you is that at least in our country today, what you'll find is that among committed Christians, so people who go to church regularly, who have kind of theological beliefs that line up with being a committed and faithful Christian, you will find among any class of people in America, they have the lowest rates of domestic abuse, the highest rates of marital satisfaction in all areas, sexual satisfaction, relational satisfaction, financial satisfaction. But here's what's interesting, nominal Christians, people who go to, who claim to be Christians but show up, you know, a couple times a year, they're cultural Christians, but they don't have really any authentic Christian faith. What you find among that group of people is that they have the highest rates of domestic abuse, the highest rates or the lowest rates of marital dissatisfaction, extremely high rates of divorce. Why? Why? Because the biblical vision can get co-opted into a secular vision. Instead of seeing what Genesis 3 is talking about as propelling us towards a beautiful redemptive vision that is seen in Christ, it can become just the way that things ought to be. And people make excuses for that kind of relationship because what Christians are doing is saying that there should be something better. See, Genesis gives us the framework and the rest of the scriptures begin to fill in the picture more and more. We need to be unsatisfied by the visions that are given to us in our culture. You know, here's the thing. You may not be familiar with some of the online personalities, the TikTok and YouTube personalities who are talking about masculinity, but they're out there and they have huge followings. People like Andrew Tate who are online, these kind of ultra-masculine people who brag about their sexual conquests and brag about the money that they make and brag about the working out that they do. He also happens to be somebody who's being indicted for sexual assault. But see, young men are finding this robust masculinity as something that is attractive, even if it's an evil one like that. Our boys are longing for a hero.
[34:45] And yet, on the other hand, you have this secular vision that diminishes masculinity. Without providing an alternative. I mean, Ken, look, at the end of the day, the Barbie movie had no suggestion for who Ken should become. The closest it got to giving Ken a future was letting him wear a sweatshirt that says that he is Ken-uff. Ken-uff. But you, like, it's so pathetic.
[35:13] You know what? You are not Ken-uff, you know? That's the message of the gospel is that none of us are Ken-uff in and of ourselves. There has to be a hope that is outside of us. See, the movie ultimately fails because it fails because all it does is critique. You know, so is it some sort of feminist manifesto then about how great women are? Well, actually, no. It's actually not a great feminist movie either. It's weird because at the very end of the movie, this was one of the, I think, one of the best parts of the movie, at least for me, was the final scene when Barbie has become, she goes back to the real world, she's becoming a real woman. But she can't be a real woman unless she does something that only real women can do. And that's go to the gynecologist.
[36:09] I'm serious. Fascinating. They have a trans actor in the movie, and yet what they're claiming as the penultimate moment is that this woman's biology makes her a woman. And it's true. Who she physically is is what makes her a woman, and that's what gives her freedom is by living into her biology.
[36:36] See, Barbie and Ken, as hard as they're trying, they can't separate them from one another. Their identity is interrelated. They need to be together in some way. Greta Gerwig just can't seem to figure out how to make it happen. She doesn't have the redemptive aspect of the vision, and that's the real problem in our cultural context. Because on the one hand, everybody's going to tell you everything's fine. Don't worry about it. No problem here. On the other hand, people are telling you the house is on fire, and we've got to come up with all these new strategies to figure it out. And what the scriptures are saying is, no, no, no. It's always been this way. The conflict has always been here.
[37:15] And we need a hope that is rooted and grounded in something bigger than our culture, in something that is coming from the scriptures. Jesus must come and return for us.
[37:31] I've gone on too long, but I'm going to close with this. It's hard to get all this stuff in in just, you know, a few minutes. Did you notice the last scene of Genesis 3? Here's where God leaves it, and I'll leave you with this. God barred Adam and Eve from the garden, but it wasn't a picture without hope, right? There was already, they'd already had this promise for this coming hero who would destroy the curse, but that, there was a clue that was, that was given in that. The clue was in the actual, the angel barred the way to the tree, to the tree of life. The tree that would have been the place that if Adam and Eve had eaten from it, they would have lived forever and perfect and in perpetual obedience to God if they hadn't disobeyed. But the tree of life was cut off, and the later biblical writers in the New Testament keep picking up on this idea. Paul picks up on this. He starts talking about how Jesus, because of the curse, Adam and Eve were barred from the garden, but Paul reverses that and says that Jesus became a curse by going into the garden and getting on a tree, by getting on the cross. Jesus became the curse that Adam and Eve should have had, and by sacrificing himself on the cursed tree, he has provided life for us. But there's actually more. There's another picture going on there.
[38:58] Have you ever noticed the parallels between the garden of Eden here that they've been brought out of and the garden where Jesus was raised? There's an angel there guarding the way in both places. In fact, Matthew tells us that the angel in the garden where Jesus was raised looked like fire, looked like lightning, which sounds a lot like the lightning that is going on here. We're told that Jesus seemed like a gardener in a garden. What the scriptures are constantly pushing you towards is Jesus has come and has provided hope in his death and resurrection that has shown us how we can live as a new humanity.
[39:40] We should be people as Christians who are utterly realistic about the world we live in. This is why Barbie is good for us. You know, we can see that everybody recognizes these problems, but we have a hope that is beyond that. And so we come with hope to remind one another of where we're going to go as we live this out together. You know, we need to do a lot of work on men and women trying to figure out what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, how to do that faithfully and well in the midst of a culture where that's really hard to see. But my prayer is that we'll do that together as people of hope.
[40:23] Let me pray for us. Lord, we pray that you would help us to see clearly things that are very difficult to see. Lord, we pray that we might be a counter example to things like the Barbie movie, that we can both be sympathetic to the problems that are articulated there and we can provide a different kind of vision, a true vision, an eternal vision. Would you empower us to do that for the glory of Jesus we pray? Amen. All right. We get to continue on in Genesis 3. I told you last week, this is one of my favorite passages. There's so much to talk about and to look at, which we will only get to scratch the surface on. But we're going to continue it and look at the second half of this passage. So give your attention to God's Word from Genesis 3. We'll begin in verse 8.
[41:25] And then they, meaning Adam and Eve, 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 God among the trees of the garden. But 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. God said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman you gave me to be with me. She gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent, he deceived me and I ate. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, above all the beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
[42:32] I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat of the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken. For you are dust and to dust you shall return.
[43:29] The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them. And then the Lord God said, behold the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach out his hand and also take of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had taken. He drove out the man and at the east. He drove out the man and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the tree of life. The way to the tree of life. Friends this is God's word and he gives it to you because he loves you and he wants you to know him. I told you last week that I was going to talk about Barbie because
[44:30] I thought Barbie was a really interesting, the Barbie movie was a really interesting commentary on Genesis chapter 3. Not so much a commentary but an interaction with. What do they have to do with one another? I think Greta Gerwig who is the director of Barbie is doing an intentional job of trying to play off of the themes of Genesis. I mean you see it just from the very beginning. At the very beginning of the movie you have this voice in the beginning Barbie was created and it's this allusion to Genesis.
[45:00] And then you have Barbie land which is kind of a garden of Eden. This perfect place where things seem to work out fine. And then you have Ken and Barbie and they're kind of like a reversal of Adam and Eve in some way. But there's far more than just illusions. The Barbie movie is attempting to deal with some of the issues that we all experience. They're attempting to, Ken and Barbie are, they're having an existential crisis. That's really what they're doing. They're both trying to figure out what it means to be a man and a woman and how they are to relate to one another. I think the reason why the movie was so popular, it grossed over a billion dollars I think, why it was so popular, why it captured attention and resonated with a lot of people is because it articulates some of the conflict that all of us experience living as men and women in the common culture that we all live in.
[46:06] You know, for women, there was a, there was an extended monologue by Barbie goes to the real world, not Barbie land. And she encounters, I should just say, they're, they're number one, they're going to be spoilers, but I warned you about it. So I don't feel bad. Second, if you haven't seen this, it's pretty easy to pick up. There's, you know, it's not, this is not rocket science here.
[46:28] So, but Barbie goes to the real world and in the real world, there's a woman there, a real mother, who kind of tries to articulate some of what it means to be a woman. She says this, she says like, we always have to be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong. You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say that you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but you also have to be thin. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the time. These conflicts that I think many women resonate with, the expectations of who they're supposed to be seem to be in conflict all the time. Ken is dealing with his own set of internal contradictions. Ken spends the entire movie, everything Ken is doing is to try to get Barbie's attention. He even goes so far as to sing a Matchbox 20 song with his guitar on the beach with a bonfire, which of course every woman should swoon for.
[47:33] But Ken gets nothing from Barbie. Everything in Ken's life is directed towards getting Barbie's attention, and she doesn't care at all. See, the movie is interesting because the movie drops you right down in the midst of the conflict between men and women that we all live in.
[47:51] The problem is, it doesn't give us a ton of answers. In fact, I think they would have done well if they had seen how Genesis 3 actually does answer some of the problems that the movie is bringing up. Questions of, how did it get this way? Could it ever get any better? Do we have any hope that there is any way through this? I think there is. I want to walk through the latter part of Genesis 3.
[48:16] I want to give you four parts, and I want to see how it engages some of the things that are going on in that movie. The first part is this, that sin inverts creation. Sin inverts creation. It turns it on its head. Let's just recap the story for just a second. Adam and Eve were created by God. They were placed in the garden. They had everything that they needed. It was a place of abundance. Adam and Eve had everything they could possibly need. God made Adam and Eve the same, but different. What was their difference? Is it because they're male and female? Well, not so much. It's more about the priority of their creation. Adam was created first, and then Eve came along next. Like two siblings of loving parents, both of them are beloved, but that birth order creates a different set of expectations, different set of responsibilities for Adam and Eve. So we get in the Bible that Adam and Eve are the same, and yet they are different in ways. Despite that difference, they were made for one another.
[49:26] They were made to have intimacy with one another, to be united together. In fact, even in their work that they were to do, they were to do their work together. They were to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it. They were to be God together. They were to be God's representatives in the entire earth. Everything was how God designed. If I had a whiteboard, I would diagram it this way. There was God first, and then He created Adam, and then there was Eve, and together Adam and Eve were over all of the animals, over all the creation. But the serpent tempted Eve, right?
[50:05] We talked about that last week. Instead of abundance, Adam and Eve saw only what was forbidden. They assumed that God was holding out on them, that there was more that they could get, that they wanted more out of their world. They wanted to control. They wanted to determine their own outcomes without reference to God. And so instead of intimacy, they fell into sin. They retreated into shame and alienation. You remember the way that immediately they start to blame one another. We read this just a second ago. Look at verse 13. Well, verse 11, who told you you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you? And Adam's first response when caught in his sin is verse 12, the woman you gave me to be with me. She's the one who gave me the food, and I ate it. It's not my fault. It's her fault.
[51:00] And then to the woman, he says, what is this that you have done? And the woman blame shifts the other way. The serpent you gave me. They're both doing this. They're both blame shifting. Instead of unity and intimacy, they're dealing with God as individuals in shame and alienation and fear. See, so quickly, what God had created has become inverted, right? Instead of God determining things for Adam and for Eve together to overseeing the animals, what has happened? It's flipped on its head, right? Now you have a serpent who is telling Eve what she needs to really have as priority. Eve is now directing things for Adam, and Adam is now telling God what his problems really are. The world has turned on its head.
[51:52] See, Genesis 3 is the story of how Adam and Eve's sin inverts the created order, turning it all upside down. This is similar to what Barbie and Ken experience when they go from Barbie land into the real world. Everything's suddenly different. See, sin has inverted the way that this world was designed to work. And because of that, stuff doesn't work right. You don't work right. Your interior world doesn't work right. Your relationship with other men and women doesn't work right. This world doesn't work. And you know what? The beautiful thing about the Barbie movie and what's so helpful about it is that Greta Gerwig intuitively feels that this world doesn't work. And she's asking the question, why? Why doesn't it work? It should work. I love this other human that I'm now married to. Why doesn't it work? Well, because of sin. So the first thing is sin inverts creation. Second, sin has cursed consequences. So God gave consequences. Traditionally, we've called these curses, you know, curses on the serpent and the woman and the man. But what's interesting is actually, as you dig into it, is that the only person that gets cursed, well, the only thing that gets cursed is the serpent in the ground. Adam and Eve do not get cursed. God is showing what would result from their disobedience. God is describing here. God is not saying it must be this way. He's going, he's saying that this is the way that it goes now. He's describing the world as it really is.
[53:41] So look at verse 14 with the serpent. Because you've done this, cursed are you above all livestock, above all the beasts of the field. On your belly you'll go and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity, I'm going to skip that. I'll come back to that. Dust all the days of your life. The serpent was cursed to walk on his belly. Now, it kind of makes you wonder, what was he doing if he wasn't already walking on his belly?
[54:08] What's going on with that? Scholars have wondered, actually, if this wasn't a snake as we understand it, but perhaps some other kind of reptile, something, maybe a dragon. I don't know, that comes back up in Revelation 12 that we just read. You know, maybe there are dragons. I don't know. We actually don't really know exactly what that was, but either way, what we're told is because he was the most crafty of all the created animals, he is now going to be the most cursed. Because he had tempted the man who was made of dust to eat, he is now going to eat dust all the days of his life. Second, the woman, she, I will multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you'll bring forth children. Your desire will be for your husband and he'll rule over you. She'll have pain and toil in childbearing. Now, this is probably not talking about just simply the physical pain of childbirth. This is talking about the emotional and relational and, yes, physical pain of the entire process of mating, of conception, of pregnancy, of birth, of child rearing. That whole process is full of relational and physical and emotional pain.
[55:31] To the man, verse 17, because you've listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. In pain you'll eat of the ground all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it'll provide for you. You shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.
[55:55] For out of it you are taken, you are dust, and to dust you will return. Pain and toil will come to Adam's work. It was his sin of eating that now he's going to have the pain of bringing forth his own food. In a sense, you could say that Eve, the woman, was now going to suffer pain in her role as a helper and as a mother. Adam was going to feel pain now in his work as a farmer and as a father.
[56:27] That sin has created cursed consequences. That's the second thing. Sin inverts creation, it creates cursed consequences. Third, sin creates conflict. Now I skipped over two details in these cursed consequences that I want to go back to. I'm going to pick up one right here, verse 16 with Eve.
[56:46] Look at what this says. I will put enmity, that means hatred, that's another word for hatred, between you and the woman, between the snake and the woman, between your offspring or your seed is the word there, your seed and her seed. He shall bruise or crush is the actual word there. He shall crush or he shall crush your head and you shall bruise his heel. What is that?
[57:14] You know what? I'm sorry. I skipped ahead of where I wanted to go. I wanted to get to, I wanted to, I did the serpent there. I wanted to go to 16. Sorry, your pain, I won't read it later when we get back to that piece. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. Your desire will be for your husband, he'll rule over you. There's two key words there. First one is your desire. Desire is going to come back up with Cain and Abel. What desire means here is the prompting towards evil. Eve has a prompting to grasp something from Adam. Her desire is for Adam. What is she desiring? She's desiring, she's desiring to grasp his affection and his attention, grasping his responsibilities that have been given to him from God, grasping power over him, grasping for control.
[58:11] You even see a hint of that in the fact that Eve is the one negotiating with the servant while Adam is chilling on the side. She's, Eve's desire, it says here, is going to be to rule and control and to dominate her husband. But how is Adam going to respond to that? He will rule over her. Rule is a negative word that describes mastery and lordship and domination. See what the dynamic is here? Man, woman is going to use whatever power is at her disposal to control and to grasp affection from and to grab responsibility from her husband and to grab responsibility from her husband and the man is going to respond back with his physical and economic and otherwise power to dominate her.
[59:06] You see what the dynamic here is? You see the consequence of this inverted and cursed creation is that woman would idolize affection from her husband and the man would idolize domination.
[59:21] You see what you've got here is you've got a major battle going on. Now if that doesn't describe the history of the battle between the sexes, I don't know what does.
[59:35] You see people sometimes when they get really angry about the situation between man and woman, even in our country, will look back at this male-dominated world and say it's because of teachings like the Bible. It's because of the teachings like the Bible that have created this.
[59:50] But that's not true. What's created the situation in which every one of us is born into and which we live is the power of sin. And what God is saying here is He's describing for you what it actually feels like to have sin change the way that you are meant to relate to the other sex.
[60:11] See the power of sin is so destructive that it has made this world one in which there is a constant battle for supremacy and power at the heart of how women relate. That is the thing that is at the heart of every marriage as well. It's an issue of power. Women using their power of influence and affection, using their power for influence and affection, men using their power for physical and economic domination. See, here's what's great about Barbie is that Greta Gerwig recognizes this.
[60:49] She recognizes that fundamentally there is conflict in that male and female dynamic. You remember when Ken went back to the real world? He discovered that actually, in contrast to Barbie land, the real world is a place that is dominated by what? Men and horses. Not sure why horses, but it's pretty great. And he begins to realize that the world is actually dominated by men and Ken thinks it's amazing. And so he picks up all these ideas. He buys books about trucks and horses and he buys furs for himself and he picks up all the things of patriarchy and he brings them back to Barbie land and he takes over Barbie's Barbie house and he makes it into what he calls his Mojo Dojo Casa house, which I just think is amazing. And the Mojo Dojo Casa house is this like man cave that is filled with big screen TVs that have sports and the Godfather on all the time. And they have many fridges filled with beer that he's convinced the
[61:56] Barbies to give to him. And what's fascinating though is it's not just that Ken wants to be in control of the Barbie house. Ken, when Barbie returns and discovers that her house has been taken over, what he does is he walks out and he says to her, this is Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa house. This is not Barbie's Mojo Dojo Casa house anymore. How does it feel to be left out? It feels bad, doesn't it? See, what Ken was doing was reasserting his dominance. He was controlling the situation. And what did the rest of the movie was about the Barbies reasserting their control over Barbie land. See, the vision for Greta Gerwig was in a world, in the real world, it's dominated by men. Now we need, now we have Barbie land that is dominated by Barbie.
[62:55] But for her, she couldn't see past this vision of who gets the power. Either Barbie's in control or Ken's in control. She has no ability to see past that fundamental thing, which goes right back to Genesis 3, which is the fundamental problem is man and woman are constantly battling for dominance and supremacy.
[63:17] She's unable to provide a vision for anything more than power. Yeah, and the reality is that's what we already observe. That's what we see in Genesis 3, and it's cursed. You don't have to pay attention very long in our own culture to see how cursed the relationship between men and women is. Just look at the statistics that, you know, a woman is assaulted by a man every 10 minutes in our country.
[63:47] See, this is why Nancy Piercy, this book that I referenced last week, but I'll hold up again, The Toxic War on Masculinity, I thought it was really helpful. And I said last week, she has these competing visions she talks about of the good man and the real man, right? The good man is good men are characterized by honor and duty and integrity. They're willing to sacrifice. They're responsible and generous. They provide for and they protect the weak. Real men, on the other hand, are tough and strong and aggressive and competitive and unwilling to show weakness. They're unemotional.
[64:29] They're imposing. They're isolated. They're self-made. See, the real man is a vision. The real man is a vision that is rooted in power and domination. See, it sounds more like a curse to me.
[64:45] You know, it might surprise you that the way that we think about male-female relationships is actually a fairly new phenomenon. Did you know that up until about the Civil War period, at least in the Western world, Europe and America, until the Civil War era, men were thought to be the morally superior sex.
[65:09] We tend to think of men as being the slouches and the luscious who need the sanctifying influence of a female, but that's actually opposite of what it was for hundreds of years. For hundreds of years, women were thought to be unchaste and in need of the moral influence of man. It was taught to men that women were going to be the ones that were going to be the moral undoing of them, the temptress kind of idea. Now, see, that's flipped. See, there is, we have these deep narratives about men and women that are floating through our culture that we have to clue into and to see what's going on. Right now, we have a very toxic way of talking about masculinity. Just being a man is somehow seen as being less than. We desperately need to provide our boys and young men with a vision of heroic masculinity, as a writer named Caitlin Flanagan talks about in an article. I've linked to this on the website. You know, what she says is a heroic masculinity is a masculinity that is strong enough to dominate, but it's only used to sacrifice for the good of others. Strong and yet sacrificial.
[66:35] You see, it's so difficult to resist the cultural narratives that our culture is giving us, both for masculinity and femininity. That's what's so powerful about this Barbie movie. But the problem is, this is so often what ends up happening is we in the church, we tend to take on these cultural narratives and we talk about what a man should be and a woman should be, and we end up using our own cultural categories and the things that we liked about our mama or we liked about our daddy or the things we think ought to be that are not actually rooted in biblical truth.
[67:11] You know, even well-meaning Christians mistakenly call their man-made visions biblical, and the stakes are really high. That's why we need some books like this. If you want to dig into this, if you're working with young people, I think this would be a really helpful book for you, and I can't possibly trace out everything that we need to talk about in just a few minutes here.
[67:34] But see, when we tell young men that they image God in simply their aggression and their dominance, then they begin to see themselves and women and even God as objects that need to be conquered.
[67:52] In the same way, when we tell our young women that they image God by controlling the men in their lives for their own good, you know, you can be the sanctifier of these men, then they're going to be confused. Is it any wonder that both Ken and Barbie are in this deep existential crisis?
[68:14] We're telling them there's a problem, which is obvious, and we're not giving them any solution to how to solve it. It wasn't always this way. It doesn't have to be this way, and it will not ultimately be this way. That's where the fourth thing comes in, that there is some hope here, that sin will be crushed. I read a minute ago the curse to the serpent. It's a really cryptic passage, verse 15, that the seed or the descendants of the serpent are going to be crushed by the seed or the descendants of the woman. Now, the seed, the serpent, and the woman represent two lines of humanity, and they have descendants, these seeds. The line of the serpent is the line of those who are in rebellion to God. The line of the woman are those who are God's people, part of His redemptive plan.
[69:09] In fact, one way that we can look at all of history is to see that there is a constant conflict between the line of the serpent and the line of the woman in conflict with one another. But at the end of those lines, what we're told is that there are two figures, the seeds. Now, it changes from descendants, multiple, to the seeds. Third person, masculine, singular. The person.
[69:36] This is the conflict we read about in Revelation 12, as is pictured in John's, in this vision that he has, that throughout the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the seed.
[69:51] Most scholars see this prediction in Genesis chapter 3, the third page of the Bible, that God is already predicting that He is going to bring a heroic end to this conflict with the serpent. That that one will come, who we know as Jesus, who will crush the head of the serpent and bring an end to the conflict that is there. The conflict of this world isn't going to last forever. And that's really the answer. That's the beginning point of understanding how we should think about these male-female relationships. See, Jesus arrives as the hero who is strong enough to destroy the works of the devil, and yet, what He uses His strength for is to sacrifice Himself for the life of His people.
[70:39] Natalie and I have this little drawing that we framed, and we got it. It's a drawing called Mary Consoles Eve. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's a picture that this, it's actually a nun who lives in Iowa who drew this a number of years ago. And it's a picture of Eve standing with her fig leaves and a snake wrapped around her leg. And she's standing face to face with Mary, who's with her pregnant belly. And Eve is touching the belly, touching Mary's belly. And the title of it is that Mary consoles Eve. Eve is now living in a world that is fundamentally different than the world that she was made to live in. She's dealing with the consequences of her own rebellion and sin against God. And Mary is showing her the hope that she has that a hero is going to come. See, this passage shows us what it looks like to have male and females who are redeemed and reflecting God's image for them. You know, on the one hand, you have Adam who is going to ultimately, through the seed of the woman, the second Adam is going to come. Jesus is going to come who shows us what masculinity ought to look like, a victorious, heroic masculinity that is strong and powerful and yet is given for the service of the week. That sacrifices himself, that never seeks his own way, but constantly seeks the good of other people, never for his own benefit. And you see in Eve and her seed coming ultimately into Jesus, but pictured with Mary as the one who bears out the hero, who enables the hero to come, who provides the context for that, both of them playing a part in our redemption. And so we need to figure out how to talk about men and women who reflect that redemptive vision. You know, one of the things that statistics will show you is that at least in our country today, what you'll find is that among committed
[73:10] Christians, so people who go to church regularly, who have kind of theological beliefs that line up with being a committed and faithful Christian, you will find among any class of people in America, they have the lowest rates of domestic abuse, the highest rates of marital satisfaction in all areas, sexual satisfaction, relational satisfaction, financial satisfaction. But here's what's interesting, nominal Christians, people who claim to be Christians but show up, you know, a couple times a year, they're cultural Christians but they don't have really any authentic Christian faith. What you find among that group of people is that they have the highest rates of domestic abuse, the highest rates or the lowest rates of marital dissatisfaction, extremely high rates of divorce. Why? Why?
[74:07] Because the biblical vision can get co-opted into a secular vision. Instead of seeing what Genesis 3 is talking about as propelling us towards a beautiful redemptive vision that is seen in Christ, it can become just the way that things ought to be. And people make excuses for that kind of relationship because what Christians are doing is saying that there should be something better.
[74:35] See, Genesis gives us the framework and the rest of the scriptures begin to fill in the picture more and more. We need to be unsatisfied by the visions that are given to us in our culture.
[74:47] You know, here's the thing, you may not be familiar with some of the online personalities, the TikTok and YouTube personalities who are talking about masculinity, but they're out there and they have huge followings. People like Andrew Tate who are online, these kind of ultra-masculine people who brag about their sexual conquests and brag about the money that they make and brag about the working out that they do. He also happens to be somebody who's being indicted for sexual assault.
[75:23] But see, young men are finding this robust masculinity as something that is attractive, even if it's an evil one like that. Our boys are longing for a hero. And yet on the other hand, you have this secular vision that diminishes masculinity without providing an alternative.
[75:45] I mean, Ken, look, at the end of the day, the Barbie movie had no suggestion for who Ken should become. The closest it got to giving Ken a future was letting him wear a sweatshirt that says that he is Ken-uff. Ken-uff. But you, like, it's so pathetic. You know what? You are not Ken-uff. You know?
[76:12] That's the message of the gospel is that none of us are Ken-uff in and of ourselves. There has to be a hope that is outside of us. See, the movie ultimately fails because it fails because all it does is critique. You know? So is it some sort of feminist manifesto then about how great women are? Well, actually, no. It's actually not a great feminist movie either. It's weird because at the very end of the movie, this was one of the, I think, one of the best parts of the movie, at least for me, was the final scene when Barbie has become, she goes back to the real world, she's becoming a real woman. But she can't be a real woman unless she does something that only real women can do.
[76:59] And that's go to the gynecologist. I'm serious. Fascinating. They have a trans actor in the movie, and yet what they're claiming as the penultimate moment is that this woman's biology makes her a woman. And it's true. Who she physically is is what makes her a woman, and that's what gives her freedom is by living into her biology. See, Barbie and Ken, as hard as they're trying, they can't separate them from one another. Their identity is interrelated. They need to be together in some way.
[77:41] Greta Gerwig just can't seem to figure out how to make it happen. She doesn't have the redemptive aspect of the vision. And that's the real problem in our cultural context. Because on the one hand, everybody's going to tell you everything's fine. Don't worry about it. No problem here. On the other hand, people are telling you the house is on fire, and we've got to come up with all these new strategies to figure it out. And what the scriptures are saying is, no, no, no. It's always been this way.
[78:06] The conflict has always been here. And we need a hope that is rooted and grounded in something bigger than our culture, in something that is coming from the scriptures. Jesus must come and return for us.
[78:22] I've gone on too long, but I'm going to close with this. It's hard to get all this stuff in in just, you know, a few minutes. Did you notice the last scene of Genesis 3? Here's where God leaves it, and I'll leave you with this. God barred Adam and Eve from the garden, but it wasn't a picture without hope, right? There was already, they'd already had this promise for this coming hero who would destroy the curse. But that, there was a clue that was, that was given in that. The clue was in the actual, the angel barred the way to the tree, to the tree of life. The tree that would have been the place that if Adam and Eve had eaten from it, they would have lived forever and perfect and in perpetual obedience to God if they hadn't disobeyed. But the tree of life was cut off. And the later biblical writers in the New Testament keep picking up on this idea, Paul picks up on this. He starts talking about how Jesus, because of the curse, Adam and Eve were barred from the garden. But Paul reverses that and says that Jesus became a curse by going into the garden and getting on a tree, by getting on the cross. Jesus became the curse that Adam and Eve should have had. And by sacrificing himself on the cursed tree, he has provided life for us. But there's actually more. There's another picture going on there. Have you ever noticed the parallels between the garden of Eden here that they have been brought out of and the garden where Jesus was raised? There's an angel there guarding the way in both places. In fact, Matthew tells us that the angel in the garden where Jesus was raised looked like fire, looked like lightning, looked like lightning, which sounds a lot like the lightning that is going on here. We're told that Jesus seemed like a gardener in a garden. What the scriptures are constantly pushing you towards is Jesus has come and has provided hope in his death and resurrection that has shown us how we can live as a new humanity. We should be people as Christians who are utterly realistic about the world we live in. This is why Barbie is good for us. You know, we can see that everybody recognizes these problems, but we have a hope that is beyond that. And so we come with hope to remind one another of where we're going to go as we live this out together. You know, we need to do a lot of work on men and women trying to figure out what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, how to do that faithfully and well in the midst of a culture where that's really hard to see.
[81:12] But my prayer is that we'll do that together as people of hope. Let me pray for us. Lord, we pray that you would help us to see clearly things that are very difficult to see.
[81:23] Lord, we pray that we might be a counter example to to things like the Barbie movie, that we can both be sympathetic to the problems that are articulated there and we can provide a different kind of vision, a true vision, an eternal vision. Would you empower us to do that for the glory of Jesus, we pray. Amen.