The Gospel According Too: Adam (Genesis 3:1-16)
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
We were laughing with Dallas and Diedrah sunday at lunch
We were talking about different philosophies of early childhood education
The classical method is awesome it teaches reason and thinking and memorization of different things like latin
We did Classical Conversations Coop las year and one day Morgan wasn’t able to take the boys so I went
I was an outcast immediately
Every other dad their was like a lawyer with 12 kids who all could play a musical instrument and here I am with a tat sleeve and two kids who have names-like we are country as pond water
it god worse
I went to beaus class and sat in an unsersized chair as they sang latin declensions …no idea to this day what that is
So I made a few jokes about it to the die hard moms in their and just got mean glares…i should have taken the hint
But we got to history and I was done
They sang histoircal moments from flash cards to childhood rhyme songs
I was done…like the worst attrocites in history to old mdondanld had a farm
And general custer led his men to a masacre at big horn
The russian revolution saw the czars and their children murdered
I made a joke and the moms started shielding their kids from me
I think I have done the same thing as classical conversations with genesis 3
It records the worst day in human history and i see it the way a renaissance painting depicts it
Like adam and eve doing this interpretive dance with an apple in hand a snake in a tree
But its deep with truth and damage
it is the greatest passage on why things arent how they are supposed to be and the Hope of the Christian Message
It is the Gospel according to Adam
So we are going to look at 3 things this morning
The anatomy of Sin, Comprehensive Consequences, and the True Adam
The Anatomy Of Sin (1-7)
The Anatomy Of Sin (1-7)
If you are here today and you are skeptical about the Christian Message or tense up at the sound of words like sin i get it
Doesn’t it seem archaic to talk like that?
Haven’t we progresses past this type of prehistoric language?
I acknowledge that there are churches who have just beat people over the head with this sin stuff
So keep an open mind…because if you are concerned with whats wrong with the lord and your life. If you are concerened with fear and sadness and grief and cruelty. If you are here and you are wondering why can’t I be what I aspire to be why can’t I ever achieve what I want to achieve you are struggling with sin
it is not hopeless or dark it is what gives immeasurable hope to the Christian Message nothing else can ever give you
See if you believe things aren’t the way they are supposed to be you already believe in the biblical anatomy of sin
This passage is the greatest glimpse into the anatomy of the bible
The bible is not a rule book to keep
It is the story of reality
It’s the story how things are and why we are separated and searching for the distant memory of the paradise lost
Chapter 3 opens with this unnamed serpent …
He was the most shrewd of all God had made
I think we believe the renaissance paintings here too much
The language to describe suggests a shiny and luminous appearance, which would get Eve’s attention.
He begins the anatomy of sin with a question:
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?”
He presents a lie of God’s original and loving permission to us
In a shrewd way the hustler is a parasite off of God’s goodness
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin The Mask of Sanity
To do its worst, evil needs to look its best. Evil has to spend a lot on makeup
He wants her to believe the building Dna of sins anatomy
to believe that God is a mean fun police in the sky or an absentee land lord
Not the loving Father who has made paradise for us…but that he is holding out
from them to us Our base problem is unbelief. Failing to trust in the infinite God, we live anxiously, restlessly, always trying to secure and extend ourselves with finite goods that can’t take the weight we put on them
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Eve and this snake maximize the prohibition and minimize the damage
Did God say you can’t eat from any tree”? maximize the prohibition…God said eat from all of them just not this one...
Eve follows in questioning God’s decision making ability when she adds…God told us we can’t eat OR touch it...
maximize whats being held out on you…and minimize what will happen when you take your fullfillment into your own hands
“No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
He was right that they would see differently
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil meant they would have the capacity to make independent judgements about how things should be…
We don’t believe God is Don’t’s are for our good
Like a parent telling our kid don’t play in the street
I have heard from many who say they can’t believe in the mean God of the bible and when they descibe that god i tell them I don’t believe in that god either…thats not the God revealed cover to cover in this book
But the anatomy of sin is not doing the NO No’s
It is asserting that you are god and should be on the throne to bring about your wants, and longings, and choices because the big guy upstairs is clueless and mean…and won’t really do anything about it
Ultimately, the only human beings we know are people who have been created to please God and build shalom but who, to a greater or lesser degree, mysteriously live against the purpose of their existence Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
There was a got milk ad in the early 90’s I believed
It was a scrawny kid in a mirror who asks what girl is gonna go for me in a body like this…im a scrawny bench warmer...
so these future versions of himself appear..getting more muscle and taller
the last one is the 18 year old him…and he says if the sight of the 18 year old you doesn’t convince you to drink more milk listen to your senior year girlfriend and this blonde appears and says hey tom I’m waiting..its awful television but youtube it
As ridiculous as it was and as bad as it was for a kid with a lactose issue to pound gallons of milk i believed that message about all of life
No regard for the world god made or how life would be found
I was in control of defining and the world giving me the good life
I beleived life owed me something more than what it was and I hated God and everything for it
When that fails..when the world fails to give it..when you fail to reach it you believe you are a victim
There is no one more dangerous then a victim and we all believe we are victims of life…
Eve was the first to believe she was a victim of the good life being held out on her
We are the exact same ..that is the anatomy of sin
So she took it …and ate it
listen to this ...
The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Enter Adam’s participation trophy
He was their the whole time oblivious trying to impress her with all the animals he got to name
Oh i called this one a koala , look that one I called a sting ray how cool is that …probably asked her are you ok? is anything wrong? 100 times...oh is it snack time already? awesome hey who is this guy your talking too
In reality he heard all of it and wanted the same thing she did…imagining the good life was being kept from him
That choice is the spray paint can to God’s perfect masterpiece…and we have all held the can and it has cosmic consequences
Why is it not only wrong but also foolish to offend God? God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless hearts come to rest. To rebel against God is to saw off the branch that supports us
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Their eyes were open but not how they thought
Comprehensive Consequences (8-13 & 16-24)
Comprehensive Consequences (8-13 & 16-24)
They are immedately seperated from God, themselves, each other, and even nature itself
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
The one who knew them
Who made them
Who walked with them…now they hide
this is the consequence of rebellion
They hid because they were naked
God says lets take a walk and adam says i can’t im naked
the use of naked here means …naked…but it conveys that they were fully known
they didn’t lose their clothes they never had them
what they lost was their purity, they lost their sense of adecaucy and acceptabliity
we all have this sense of loss…
why is it that you feel the way you feel?
this feeling of inadequacy, insecurity, like we can’t ever just arrive?
it is because we all have this memory trace of glory loss, or greatness lost, of paradise lost
It’s not like they werent naked before what changed is that vulnerablity was now something they couldn’t stand
Before they chose to be their own masters they had no problem with radical vulnerability
And we have unbeleivable creativity in finding ways to hide our vulnerability
we are pro’s at hiding those things that if we don’t cover we will never be loved
they hide from each other with fig leaves, they hide from god in the trees, and they cover from their own eyes with blame shifting
they have to completly control what is seen and known about them
the essence of the human condition from this day on we believe we can only be loved if we are not fully known
Its not the way its supposed to be
what drives us is this very thing…to be covered
why do we exhaust ourselves to work and earn? why is it some of us have to save the world be the helper for anyone? why do some of us have this tough exterior? why do we kill ourselves in a gym and diet to maybe be attractive enough?
Because we cannot deal with our inadequacy if we don’t do something
WE all grab a fig leaf…and it never works
We are also separated from each other
every dimension of life is hit by sin
He said to the woman:
I will intensify your labor pains;
you will bear children with painful effort.
Your desire will be for your husband,
yet he will rule over you.
Now rule means that a man will tend to try and dominate women because of the emptiness sin creates
That is why most domestic abuse cases are men abusing women, sin tends to make men oppress women
men will idolize power
and her disire will be for her husband
The language means that women will make the relationship an idol
of course there are gender differences …they are different idols
Tim Keller says the positive colememtariness of malenss and femaleness under sin now becomes mutually confirming addictions”
Adam was the first man to ask are you ok? is something wrong? question everythinng
we are a mystery to each other
if you need marriage counseling i can give you chips number
Adam is blaming god for everything…look at this woman you said I just couldn’t do without
That same need to cover up impacts how we treat each other
Its not a male female thing a bunch of guys together is a flex off and I have no idea what a group of women even do but I know its not easy unless we all work on being vulnerable
Not just that we see we are seperated from nature itself
Imagine a clock where one gear
originally we were in charge of nature and now its in charge of us
now it controls us
I wanted to suprise Morgan when we lived in Birmingham with a garden so I tilled up the clay and fought that dirt
Poured all kinds of nitrogen and who knows what and created the anti garden..scorched earth
imagine a clock where all the gears are working together in its place meshing perfectly
and one gear says i dont like this axel down here I want to move up there
genesis 3 says we are the gear that fell off and furhter down now the whole thing is going crazy…grinding cracking, burning metal smell
didnt thing you’d get called an axel this morning
Geroge Whitfield once said “have you noticed when you move close to nature the birds chirp at you, the snakes hiss at you, the dogs bark at you?…because they know…they know that you have a quarrel with your master”
nature that should be our friend is now our enemy because we rejected our place in the grain of the universe
Romans 8:22-23 says everything is
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now. Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the firstfruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
We want to be set free and the Gospel according to Adam is the great hope we now get to hold too
As wanderers east of Eden God has given us the way home
We needed a second Adam to win where the first Adam lost
The True Adam (14-15)
The True Adam (14-15)
Dorothy Sayers was a British Novel writer in the early 1900’s.
She wrote crime novels and the main character in her books was Lord Peter Whimsy.
Whimsy was a bachelor in her books and alone when not on the case solving crimes.
Eventually a young woman appeared in the books.
The character had the same biography as Sayers the author and what became clear was this.
Sayers saw her main character as broken unfulfilled and alone.
Unable to fix himself.
So she wrote herself into the story to save him from his heartache.
The Gospel means that God has written himself in to our story because we cannot fix our oldest problem
Even on the worst day
Even when we broke God’s heart he had already made a way
He was going to write Himself into the story of the people he set His affections on and do what the first adam failed to do
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.”
at unimaginable pain and cost he would cover and kill the dragon and get the girl
The anti creation is a desert wilderness
As adam was tested in the garden the second adam was tempted in the wilderness adams sin created
That is the reason the temptation narratives of Jesus are in the Bible
It is why they are so important
Will the second Adam fall where the first Adam did
Remember the anatomy of sin and see the same temptation to reject the fathers design
Luke 4 lays it out
Tell the stone to be bread …why have it hard? use your power not to suffer? Reject the obedience of this father who would leave you hungry?
where the first adam was disobeient to the Word of God the second adam says it is by the word he will live
he then tempted Him with all the kingdoms and power of the world
Men idolize power remember
So Jesus fully man fully god was tempted just like we are to take the power reserved for God and be glory theives…and the second Adam is faithful to submit to God’s power and reign
Exactly where the first adam failed
lastly he is given an half truth from the psalms…and Jesus retells it back to satan as it was intended…as eve should have done...
Faithful where the first adam and we all fail
And look at the best part
Restoration touches earth
this earth where all isnt how its supposed to be was restored in the wilderness
He was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and the angels were serving him.
after the second adam was faithful …nature and man were in the right order..
He was with the animals just as Adam was before sin..
The temptation of Jesus was when He won…through obedience he took the throe
As trees fill the pages of genesis 2 and 3 a tree was His coronation
The abundance of paradise regained was purchased on a tree outside of the city as the second Adam took the last place left to stand in for us…the father turned away from the son so he would never turn his back on you
that is the gospel according to adam
Lets pray
Resurrection occured in a garden
Death happened on a tree