[0:00] From Genesis chapter 3, the first book in the Bible. And we'll read the entire chapter.
[0:14] Now as we read through this chapter, I'd like to be able to, it's not a, I'm not trying to make excuses in any way.
[0:34] But what I would like to say is that I'll be addressing the entire chapter. One thing I won't be addressing specifically is why Satan is in the Garden of Eden.
[0:48] You know, this perfect environment and why is Satan there? I'm going to focus on what happened rather than the question behind the question.
[0:58] And that is why did God allow Satan into a perfect garden that didn't have any sin? If you want to come and speak to me afterwards about that, I could give you a short answer. But it's not one that can be explained necessarily in a sermon.
[1:13] We'd have to sort of do a Bible study on that because there's lots of questions. But here we have Genesis 3, now hear God's Word. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.
[1:31] He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden.
[1:43] But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. Neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die.
[1:56] For God knows when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will become like God, knowing good and evil. So 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 to be desired to make one wise, she took its fruit and she ate.
[2:15] And she also gave some to her husband, who was also with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked.
[2:26] And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
[2:38] 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?
[2:49] And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?
[3:02] The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done?
[3:14] And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. And the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this. Cursed are you above all livestock and above all the beasts of the field.
[3:25] On your belly you shall go, the 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.
[3:39] To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.
[3:52] And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and you have eaten of the tree which I commanded you, which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
[4:04] 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 the plants of the field.
[4:17] 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 dust you shall return. The man called his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living.
[4:32] And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil.
[4:45] Now lest he reach out his hand and also take of the tree of life and eat. Eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
[4:58] Then 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 way to the tree of life.
[5:11] Oh my God. My God blessed that reading to us and of course the meaning of it when we come back to it after this next hymn.
[5:24] Amen. Well if you have Genesis chapter 3 open in front of you it will be helpful in many different ways.
[5:53] As we make our way through I'd like to focus mainly on this very clear message that the world is broken. And you're broken.
[6:06] And you need to be mended. And Christ is the only one who can mend you and mend the world. He is the only one who can mend the people that you love who are broken.
[6:18] He is the only one who can mend anything that is broken. He is the only one who can make everything work the way that it is meant to work.
[6:31] And so we live in a broken world. We live in a broken world with broken people. And those broken people lead to broken relationships and broken commitments and broken trust.
[6:43] And lots of other broken things. And we've become so used to living with brokenness. That sometimes we don't actually see it as brokenness anymore but just a part of life.
[6:58] Life. And therefore we don't consider those things to be something that Christ will touch. Something that Christ will make good again.
[7:09] That that's not something that Christ is involved in. And so the basic principle here is no. God created the world in Christ Jesus. The whole world and everything in it.
[7:19] And in this broken world God has not separated himself from it. But in fact the very opposite gave his son into a broken world to make it good again.
[7:33] To restore it. To redeem it. You. And that's really important. Now of course there are many other things in Genesis 3 as I said that we just won't have time to touch upon.
[7:46] You know why was the serpent in a perfect garden there to tempt Eve. We can we can touch on it. Why does Adam blame God.
[8:01] He doesn't say he doesn't blame his wife. He blames God forgiving him the woman. In other words he's not saying that his wife is the problem. But rather God is the problem forgiving him this person into his life.
[8:14] She caused it all. But it she wouldn't have caused it all if you didn't give it to me. Lord. That's his he turns on God. We don't really have time to go into that as such.
[8:26] But I want to acknowledge it. We saw in our Bible studies one of the reasons why perhaps the fig leaf is so important. And why Jesus curses the fig tree in the New Testament.
[8:37] And why the first thing that Adam and Eve or she's not called Eve at that point. Adam and the woman grab fig leaves to cover themselves the moment that they're naked.
[8:47] Is it possible that the tree that they took the fruit from was a fig tree. And they grab the leaves off those branches in order to cover themselves. It's just an interesting point.
[8:59] It doesn't really change the passage until you get to the New Testament. And is Jesus making a stronger point when he curses the fig tree because it is not producing fruit.
[9:10] It's interesting as you read the Bible how God weaves these stories together. The fact that when a mother gives birth to a child her pain is increased.
[9:22] The fall doesn't cause a mother-to-be to suffer in childbirth. She was always going to suffer. It's just that those sufferings are multiplied now because of sin.
[9:36] It was never going to be an easy ride for women to give birth. But because of sin that process is multiplied.
[9:47] The suffering is multiplied. And then interestingly of course Adam when he gives his wife a name eventually. After God has said that you came from the dust and back to the dust you shall return.
[10:03] In other words now you'll die. You'll physically die. You'll physically come to an end. He calls his wife Eve the mother of all living. Everything is going in the opposite direction.
[10:19] And yet he decides to call his wife Eve the mother of all living. And it's very clear it would seem that he understands the promise that God has made in Genesis 3.15.
[10:30] And Genesis 3.15 is the first promise of the Lord Jesus Christ. That Satan who has ruined this will be at enmity with the seed of the woman.
[10:42] Which is a very odd phrase because you can't have a seed of a woman. You can only have the seed of a man. And that's how childbirth takes place. You have a man and you have a woman and then a child comes along.
[10:54] But not in this case. The seed of the woman is of course the Mary that is to come. And her child with no human intervention will crush the head of Satan.
[11:06] And Christ on the cross defeats Satan. And so we have this wonderful promise. Now that's sort of the background to everything that has happened and has happened.
[11:19] The foreground is that we live in a world that is completely broken. And we have no idea how good it was before it was broken.
[11:30] We hear what Adam and Eve lived, what type of garden they lived in. But we never ever got to live in that type of garden. But the world isn't all bad.
[11:42] And that's not because the world isn't all bad. But rather because God softens the badness by giving his common grace. God's common grace is the grace that is common to all people, all countries, everywhere.
[11:56] God's particular grace is what you find in God's people, in his church. But God's common grace is found everywhere. And God's common grace makes life easy or easier in a broken world.
[12:13] Now many people don't notice this common grace because you still have broken relationships. You still have countries that go to war with each other. And one of the things that we are meant to see here is that this brokenness will never resolve itself given enough time.
[12:33] Nothing will ever resolve itself given enough time. Someone has to mend that which is broken. And so we live in a broken world.
[12:43] We live with broken people. Everything is broken. Time will not resolve that brokenness. And only Christ can. And that's really the projection of Genesis chapter 3.
[12:58] Now as we think about brokenness, we can't come to it with a modern mind and a modern approach. Because the modern mind and a modern approach is, if it's broken, I'll just get a new one.
[13:11] That I'm able to walk away from the old one because there's a new one available. Now God could have. God could have done a lot of things. And what God can do doesn't interest me all that much.
[13:25] What interests me is what God does do. I'm very fond of listening to people who can say, well God can do that. God can do this. God can. And of course he can.
[13:37] But our concern should be with what God does do. And what God is doing. And what does God do here in a broken world.
[13:49] Well his response is to give his son. Not to walk away. But to promise to restore. Promise to mend. Promise to redeem. Promise to make good that which is broken.
[14:02] He doesn't start all over again. He doesn't have the attitude, well you know, two out of three isn't bad or that type of let's have another go. It was broken by us.
[14:14] And he doesn't walk away. But rather he seeks to mend it. And so in short, Genesis chapter 3 is about how we broke the world. And how God promises to mend it in Christ Jesus.
[14:28] How we broke ourselves. And how God promises to mend us in Christ Jesus. So here's the summary as it were of Genesis chapter 3.
[14:40] You'll notice that it begins simply by a conversation. And the temptation comes out of the conversation. And God's people live in a place where everything is yes and there is only one no.
[14:54] Everything is yes and there is only one no. How hard can it be to stay away from the one no? You know, isn't that what we want our church to be like?
[15:06] Our families to be like? Do we all not want to live in sort of an environment where there are more yeses than there are no's? Well of course we do.
[15:16] But here they actually did live in an environment where everything was yes and only one no. And Satan doesn't refer to God as Lord God.
[15:28] And for those of you who are aware of how important that is. It's because God in chapter 1 is referred to as God. God in the end of chapter 1 into chapter 2 is referred to Lord God.
[15:40] His name changes. Because he enters into relationship. So when I married Susan, she went from being Susan Clark to Susan Ralph. She took my name. And that's to identify that we have entered into a relationship.
[15:56] Her name is changed. She's now identified as being in a relationship by a name change. Well God goes from God to Lord God. But when Satan refers to God here, he doesn't refer to him in the covenant name.
[16:09] Just God. And that's the first indication that Eve is speaking to someone who is out of covenant with God. Not in relationship with God. And he gives himself away by how he speaks about God.
[16:24] How he refers to him. Not the Lord God. But just God. Then of course the question arises. Eve understands the issue. But like Eve and like most people, she thinks that she can improve upon the command of God.
[16:39] And she adds something. And that is neither shall you touch it. Well God never said that you couldn't touch the tree. Or the fruit. He said you couldn't eat it. So why would Eve or the woman at this point consider it important to add that.
[16:56] That neither shall we touch it. Well, as it continues, Satan begins to tempt her. He begins to convince her that if she eats of it, she'll become like God.
[17:10] But she's already made in the image of God. But Satan is promising her that she can become like God, knowing good and evil. Now at this point, it's really important for you to know that this is a time-based prohibition.
[17:25] Not an eternal prohibition. God's people are always meant to know the knowledge of good and evil. But they were not to grab for it ahead of time. They were meant to know it in maturity, not in immaturity.
[17:40] And so the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not a no, not never. It was a no, not now. And we know that from the book of Hebrews. That God's people were meant to grow up and be able to tell the difference between the knowledge of good and evil.
[17:54] That was something that God wanted them to do. But they were to do it in obedience. They were to get there by obedience rather than by disobedience. They were to get there in immaturity rather than by immaturity.
[18:11] And so what Satan is promising here is something that they're always going to get anyway. But he says you can have it now. And how familiar that is in this day and age.
[18:26] You can have it now. There's no need to wait. You can cut corners. You can have it right now. Well, he convinces the woman that this is something to desire.
[18:38] She then desires it. She sees that it is good for food. She eats it. And of course, she then gives some to her husband. And he eats.
[18:49] They've both done what God commanded them not to do. As they continue, something begins to happen to them which they did not expect.
[19:03] And they begin to see themselves in a different light. Now that they understand that they're naked and now they're ashamed. And they hide themselves. They sew fig leaves together to cover themselves.
[19:14] And it's out of this act of disobedience that all of this begins to unravel. Because of the sin that they have committed, which is listening to someone else's words rather than the words of God and obeying them, they have become broken.
[19:31] Satan has broken them, promising them that they would be better people when in fact he would break them. And Eve breaks herself in disobedience.
[19:42] Adam breaks himself in disobedience. And you've heard me say this before, that Adam's real response, what Adam should have done at this point, instead of taking the fruit and eating it, he should have stood before God and said, my life for hers.
[20:01] That's what he should have done for his wife. He should have not eaten. He should have come before God, recognizing that she has sinned, and said, take my life in place of her.
[20:14] And of course he doesn't do it. It takes another husband to do that on behalf of his bride, Christ. And so what you have in Christ Jesus is you have the husband, who's going to marry his people, the church, standing before God saying, don't take their life, take mine.
[20:34] And so we know Adam should have done that because that's exactly what Christ did thousands of years later. But Adam doesn't do that.
[20:45] And of course Christ, the last Adam, the second Adam, does the very thing the first one didn't do. And so we get these wonderful parallels taking place.
[20:56] Now the interesting thing here is that as we begin to see this unfold, God created his people to be in relationship with him, and through the act of disobedience, they have been taking out of relationship with him.
[21:16] That's the first thing that's broken. Well, it's the first thing among many things. They are broken. Their relationship with God is broken. God created a world so that his people would come to share in him and everything that he had.
[21:29] And everything is broken through one act of disobedience. Everything is broken for them doing the very thing that they were not meant to do. Sin just ruins everything.
[21:40] Sin breaks everything. And this is why the confession of sin is so important today, because sin continues to break things. It goes around our life like a sledgehammer.
[21:53] There's no tactfulness. It just only seeks to break things. And so wherever sin is present, you can expect things down the line of that sin to be broken in your life or to be broken in the lives of other people.
[22:10] If we're not going to war with sin, then we're not going to war with that which will end up breaking us. And the way that you go to war with sin is by confessing it.
[22:22] You just have to confess that sin and get it out your system and recognize that you need God's grace and God's strength to be able to keep confessing.
[22:32] And so now relationship is broken. The world is broken. The ground is going to be difficult to farm.
[22:44] Motherhood is going to be increasingly difficult. The relationship between man and wife, I mean, most men tend to get excited in the verse where it says, where God is saying to the woman, your desire shall be for your husband.
[22:57] But there is absolutely nothing worse for a woman to desire her husband in this way because the desiring here is the same type of desiring that sin does as it crouches at your door.
[23:09] That the moment sin enter the world, that equality between men and women, that relationship between the compatible strengths.
[23:20] So the reason why the woman is considered a helper, as you well know, and I've said this to you many times before, is because the woman has strengths that the man doesn't have.
[23:31] That's why they're compatible. And most men today don't always recognize the strengths that their wives have. And sometimes they're embarrassed to admit that their wives are ten times better than they are at certain things.
[23:46] And there's nothing wrong with that. You get fed up with it after a while. I'm not, you know, my wife is better than me at a hundred things. But on the other end, God must have given me something that I have strength that my wife doesn't have.
[24:05] That's how it's compatible. What happens then in sin is instead of those being compatibilities, they become things where you try and triumph over each other.
[24:17] You try and one-upmanship over each other. And so the woman's desire for her husband is no longer one where she desires him in sort of relational type of way.
[24:32] It's where she's seeking to get one over him. She's seeking to be the dominant force in the relationship. And of course, the man seeks to be dominant in a way that he shouldn't be.
[24:45] You know, because he has physical strength that the woman doesn't have, he can dominate in a way that can be very destructive in a relationship. And we've seen that happen.
[24:57] And so everything is ruined by sin. Everything is absolutely broken. Now the question is, what does that broken look like? What does that sinful brokenness actually look like in Genesis 3?
[25:11] Because it's easy to say, well, relationships are broken. Well, that would be true. It's easy to say that relationship with God is broken. Well, that's a sign of brokenness. Okay, but there are many more signs of brokenness here.
[25:23] And the first one is what we see Satan do. You'll notice that as Satan begins to convince the woman to eat of the fruit, he asks the question, did God really say?
[25:37] And then the woman begins to answer him back and says, yeah, God really said that we're not to eat from it. And she adds, neither shall we touch it. She goes further than what God actually commanded.
[25:49] But she at least knows that she is not meant to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Now, she is led to believe that God is somehow holding something back from her.
[25:59] But as I've said, if you understand it properly, this is not a no, not never. It's rather a no, not now. Because even God says that when they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that they have become like us.
[26:14] Satan was telling the truth in one sense, but he was telling it in a way where he got Eve to disobey the direct command of God. So the next thing that Satan does is you shall not surely die.
[26:29] And there's the first sign of brokenness. The first sign of brokenness in Genesis 3 from Satan's point of view is the denial of the judgment of God. In a broken world, there is no such thing as God's judgment.
[26:45] There is only such a thing as consequence. Bad things happens because it's consequential. It has nothing to do with God. In a broken world, the message is a message of this is how you can avoid consequences and these are the consequences if you do these actions.
[27:06] In a broken world, the denial of God's judgment is denied to such an extent where no longer people ever consider it. So a broken world does not proclaim or promote the truth that whatever you're dealing with in life, you're dealing with God.
[27:22] You're just dealing with mistakes. You're not dealing with sin. You're just dealing with consequences. You're not dealing with judgments. And that's what Satan is...
[27:32] You won't die. That won't happen. And so the first sign of a broken world that we can spot here and here today is the denial of God's judgment.
[27:46] That whatever I'm dealing with in life, I'm dealing with God. People don't think like that. Bad things happen. Well, that was just a consequence of that happening. It's out of my control.
[27:58] But that's just such a humanistic way of speaking when we truly believe that God is in control of everything. So the person who denies the judgment of God is living in a broken world and has broken themselves to the point where they can no longer see that that is not a reflection of the truth.
[28:18] Bad things happen because it's just a part of life. It's just a consequence. It's just a... You can avoid these social consequences by doing this or doing that or going there or not going there.
[28:30] You can avoid a lot of life's consequences. But that... That... All of that can be spoken of without any reference to God whatsoever. And so in a broken world, God's judgment doesn't get a looking.
[28:45] It doesn't reflect the truth that God has a right to judge according to the commands he initially gave. That if you do eat from that tree, you shall surely die, says Satan.
[29:01] No, you won't. You won't die. The denial of judgment is firstly the sign of his broken relationship with God and then he promotes that on to Adam and Eve.
[29:14] And of course, from it, their lives are completely ruined. They can never return to the position which God made them in. Satan has ruined them.
[29:26] The sin that they committed has broken them. And now we have a broken world with broken people. Everything is broken. Everything is just going downhill.
[29:39] And so sinfulness never reflects truth. Sinfulness never reflects what God has actually taught. And so the judgment of God is no longer a real thing.
[29:54] The judgment of God is no longer a real thing. And yet it's a very real thing. When we get to the Lord Jesus Christ, when we're explaining the importance of Christ, we're explaining that he took the judgment.
[30:07] We're explaining that those who do not repent and believe will face the judgment. And so the whole gospel story, beginning, middle and end, includes this very clear idea that God's judgment is very real and it's something you cannot escape unless you escape it in Christ Jesus.
[30:26] But in a broken world, it's all about consequences. It's not about judgment. It's all about, well, stuff happens. It's not about God's dealing with me.
[30:37] God's out the picture. Well, the next thing that we begin to see in a broken world is the idea of people hiding themselves.
[30:49] That they go into hiding because they're ashamed of what they are, what they have become. Brokenness is seen in relational separation. Not only do God's people hide themselves from God in the bushes, you'll notice that they hide themselves from each other.
[31:03] The man and the woman are not together when they hide themselves. They just separate. They cover themselves. They hide. They know that God, they immediately know that God is going to be displeased with what they have done.
[31:19] And the questions that God asks Adam is simply to reveal to Adam that God knows what's going on, you know, in a very clear way.
[31:29] Sin separates. It doesn't just break and denies. It separates and brings shame on what was innocent.
[31:42] Really, really innocent. To be naked and unashamed is just another way of saying, although they were no doubt physically naked and physically unashamed, but it's another way of saying that they had nothing to hide.
[31:59] Sinful people hide things. Sinful people try and hide things from God. Sinful people definitely hide things from other people so that they're not found out.
[32:15] You know, this is why the key question concerning temptation and sin is such a key one. In other words, if you can commit a sin knowing that you can get away with it, are you more likely to commit it?
[32:28] Of course you are. But if you live with the constant knowledge that the judgment of God and God is there, then of course that shapes your life entirely differently.
[32:42] But hiding things is part of being sinful. It's not right, but it's real. People hide drink problems. People hide drug problems.
[32:54] People hide spending habits. People hide this, that, and the other. But the real issue is that people hide themselves. You don't actually know who people are when you look at them.
[33:10] You think about the clothes that we wear. They tell a story. I wear the same ones every week to tell the same story. It's just comfort. It's what it is.
[33:20] I can't cope with change. But clothes tell a story. The type of sunglasses you wear tells something about you. how short or long your skirt is.
[33:34] The type of clothes that you wear, the type of cars that you drive. Everything is designed around to cover and to promote something else. Everything is designed around to cover Everything is designed around to cover fashion world is based on covering and promoting.
[33:52] One of the best things of being able to notice this is that this kind of hiding yourself is in this world of personal social media. I want to make a distinction that there is a difference between business social media where you're promoting a business.
[34:09] But you think of personal social media now and people who promote themselves. People have become today what they share. Or rather, people want to become what they share.
[34:25] Because what they share is very selective, very chosen, very curated. And so people become what they share. Or rather, they become what they share.
[34:37] What they want to share. Or what they are sharing. That's just another way of hiding. None of those images gets to see you how you speak to your children or to your husband or to your wife.
[34:54] None of those images demonstrate what you're like when you have to deal with a particular temptation. No, you show an image. And in that image, you hide other things.
[35:08] In other words, the fall hasn't gone away. That brokenness is still there. Only the other day, on I didn't watch it, my wife was telling me, that they did this experiment with two people who had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
[35:32] And they were asked, both the man and the woman, they were asked for a week or for a month, whatever it was, to not doctor their images. To not, you know, put a, whatever filters you have on them.
[35:45] But just take photos, plain and simple, as it were, as you were going. At the end of the period of time, the man had lost something like 300,000 followers.
[35:59] I mean, if you call that life, then, you know, I'm sure it's interesting to some people. But there's the idea, and the woman had lost several hundred thousand as well. And of course, they went back to doctor in their images.
[36:13] We share what we want to be. We're hiding. And so the idea of being true-faced is overtaken by being two-faced.
[36:30] And that's a product of brokenness. That's a product of the sin. No one's getting blamed here. It's just an observation of what brokenness looks like in a modern world. People hide.
[36:43] They hide their brokenness. Now, there is one more identifying mark, at least here, in this idea of brokenness.
[36:54] And it's seen in the act of speech. Satan's speech gives him away. The way that he refers to God in calling him God, not Lord God, is a dead giveaway that he's already out of relationship with him.
[37:08] For instance, if further down the line, let's say ten years, that I've referred to Susan no longer as Susan Ralph but as Susan Clark, you would immediately go to the relationship.
[37:21] You would be able to identify that a name change indicates something about a relationship, that a relationship has changed. By God's grace, that will never happen.
[37:34] But we understand how speech gives the game away. what you say and what you don't say. Satan then begins to speak, making out that what, if she takes this through, that it'll be good for her, but it'll actually break her.
[37:51] And so we begin to see today that brokenness is in the way that people speak about God. If God is this, then he would do that. If God is powerful, then he would do that.
[38:02] If God is loving, then he would do that. God is speaking about God, but no one is saying anything, or not no one. But it clearly is the case that what you say gives the game away regarding your relationship and where you stand.
[38:19] Christians are able to praise God. Christians are able to speak well of God because the relationship has been mended. It's no longer broken. But those who do not have a relationship with God and are broken themselves and live in a broken relationship with God do not speak well of God or do not speak of God at all.
[38:39] What they say gives the game away. What they say indicates either brokenness or restoration. When you speak of God, you hear the words of restoration behind it.
[38:53] When you praise God, you hear redemption, restoration, relationship. When you sing, what you're actually hearing is people who are restored, who are redeemed, who are no longer broken.
[39:10] But out there in speech, you have brokenness everywhere. And so as you begin to deal with the issues of life and you begin to hear people speak, you begin to realize that it is even tempting for Christians, though this should never be the case, to deal with sin in the wrong way.
[39:32] That is, not to confess it. You know, too many Christians, let alone non-Christians, deal with sin in the same way they deal with a wonky table leg. They get a piece of folded card and stick it under.
[39:46] Well, that'll do. That'll... Or they deal with sin in the same way they deal with a stain on their carpet. Instead of scrubbing it out, they move the coffee table over so you can't see it.
[39:56] It's hidden. And what God is calling us to is to come to him that we would repent of that sin and that he would mend us, restore us, make us well.
[40:12] And so, people deal with sin one, by not speaking about it and therefore not confessing it. And so, what we say or what we don't say gives our brokenness away, how broken we are.
[40:28] And then there's the promise. And then we have to understand how bad things are to really appreciate why only Christ can redeem. You need to appreciate that the world will not mend itself.
[40:43] You need to appreciate that you won't mend yourself. That your family and your friends and your neighbours and your work colleagues, those who are... They will not mend themselves.
[40:53] Time will not make anything different. And so, what's needed is Christ and Christ alone. And this is what God promises in Genesis 3, 15.
[41:05] That he is the only one who can mend brokenness. He is the only one who can redeem the lost. He is the only one who can restore relationships. He is the only one who can deal with sin that ruins everything.
[41:19] And so, what we read in Genesis 3, 15, is that 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.
[41:34] And the picture here, as we see in the rest of the New Testament, is that someone has to defeat Satan. Someone has to crush him. And Christ is sent to deal with him.
[41:48] But not only does he deal with Satan, he deals with the brokenness that has been left behind by what Satan did. So, not only does he defeat the enemy, he rescues the people.
[42:03] Not only does he deal with the one who ruined everything so that he does not ruin it again, he rescues the people who have been ruined back to the place where they were meant to be, back to the place that they were in the beginning, perfect, before God.
[42:21] And so, if we don't understand just how broken the world is, we don't understand the need of Christ. If we don't understand that we can't fix it, then we will believe that we can fix it and therefore we have no need of Christ.
[42:34] We can't fix our own brokenness. We cannot fix the brokenness of any kind in our relationships with others. It takes Christ to do it all.
[42:45] death is never natural. It's become something that we have got used to. But you've got to remember that death is penal. Death is not a consequence, but rather a judgment.
[43:01] And it's something that God can take away by putting Christ in your place and taking that judgment. And that's where we get to in the gospel. gospel. The cross is not a consequence of God loving you.
[43:14] The cross is the judgment which is real, which Christ takes on your behalf so that you don't have to. It is the only solution to brokenness. It is the only solution to sinfulness that results in all that brokenness.
[43:30] It is the only thing that can bring you back to where you are meant to be. Time will not resolve anything. It will only be resolved in Christ Jesus. Well, here's the exhortation then as we close.
[43:47] The call is for you to come to God who made you. And the call is for you to tell others to come to God who made them.
[43:59] To see a world of brokenness is to see a world where we can do nothing about it. Our job is simply to pray to the one who can, to proclaim the one who has, so that men and women, boys and girls, would not live broken lives.
[44:16] And that life is not a series of good and bad decisions with consequences at the end of it. Rather, life is something which is accountable at the end of which we will be judged.
[44:32] As I said, brokenness in this world hides the fact of God's judgment and promotes a life of consequences. That's not the case. Not even close.
[44:44] And only God can bring you to him and only God can bring you to each other. And so the call is for you to believe with all your heart, with all your mind, confess with your mouth that what God did, he did for you.
[44:57] Essentially, if I can put it absolutely simply, what it means is this, that everything that you read about Jesus, in order for you to understand it properly, you must understand it under this one simple position.
[45:12] And that is that what he did, he did for you. When Jesus came, he did it for you. When Jesus died on the cross, he did it for you. When he rose from the dead, he did it for you.
[45:24] When he seeks and saves, he's doing it for you. When he restores and redeems, he's doing it for you. If you miss that, then you miss Christ. And God is calling you to come to the one who's done all that for you.
[45:39] What is so objectionable about a man who lies down his life for you? Nothing. Sin ruins everything.
[45:52] It denies, it hides, it promotes, lies, promises much, delivers little. And time can never overcome those problems.
[46:06] Public policy can never overcome those problems. The absence of war can never overcome those problems. And economic flourishing can never overcome these problems.
[46:18] Only Christ can deal with them. God is calling you this morning to come to him in Christ Jesus.
[46:30] And God is calling you to take that message also to others. There is no safety outside of Christ Jesus, only brokenness.
[46:41] God is and so the cause for you to come. So come in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.