The Bible Binge: He Started It! (Genesis 3:1-24)

Cornhole Origins

Tossing bean bags at a board 27 feet away, hoping your bean bag lands in the hole. We had cornhole boards set up at our pumpkin patch and the kids loved it. Cornhole is a game that has its origins with the Cincinnati Bengals and tailgating. Except not really. Cornhole as we know it really did begin in the Cincinnati area, some people claiming to have played it in the 1960s on Cincinnati’s west side. But if you wonder where they got it, no one knows for sure. And if you look the game up on the internet, you’ll find there’s a similar game patented in the Chicago area in the 1800s patterned after a game in England. That game had boards with a square hole and a bell… and bags filled with corn or beans were tossed at the board. But if you ask Native Americans, they’ll tell you about a game they had 500 years ago with a board with multiple holes and bags filled with corn. Still, you ask any Bengals fan and they’ll tell you it started at their tailgates in the 90s.

Origin stories. We all love origin stories. We all want to know where or how something started. And if we are in love with the origin story enough, we’ll figure out ways that we are part of that origin story. Whatever origin story we tell and wherever we tell it, what we’re looking at today is the original origin story. For you and for me. We continue our Bible Binge today.. this past week we began to read the book of Genesis.. and tomorrow, Genesis 10-12 is the Bible Binge reading for the day as we make our way through the Bible in 14 months.

The Book of Genesis is the book of Origins. Genesis tells us where we came from. Why we’re here. And the book of Genesis contains our origin story. And it is the Bible’s origin story. Genesis chapter 1. The great leader Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and he wrote Genesis, most likely to the nation of Israel as they wandered in the desert on their way to the Promised Land.

He Started It!

If you are in Moses' audience, like any kind of university class dealing with philosophy or history or anthropology… what's one of the first questions addressed? What's the first major question we ask ourselves when we begin to understand life? We ask, "where did I come from?""Where did we come from?" And Moses starts there… the children of Israel want to know… where did we come from? Why are we out in this desert? Where did this all start? Genesis 1 is where it all starts. And in the very first verse we are told this:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

In the beginning God. It doesn't tell us where God came from. From the beginning of the Bible to the end of the book, the Bible presumes there is a God. And it all goes from there. God created the heavens and the earth. The rest of the chapter and the next give us more details about how the heavens and the earth came to be. God made all of this. In fact, John 1:1 tells us it was actually the Son of God, who we now know as Jesus, who spoke all of this into existence. All of creation, the whole universe, made by the Son of God.. Spoken into existence out of nothing.

There are three things… very quickly… we need to get our of our birth story here. If we were to read the rest of that very first chapter, we’d find these patterns.. the first is:

The rhythm of night and day

Night and day. Darkness and light. As the story of creation unfolds, you get the sense that God created a specific order… that whatever is going on in the evening and the darkness is going to give way to the light.

The second is a recurring statement… over and over and over…

God saw that it was good

There was nothing wrong with creation. In fact, it was perfectly good. There was no sin, no death, no crying, no evil, no war, no hunger, no thirst, no famine, no being woken up at 3 in the morning by the steak that is not digesting all that well… no sickness. It is perfect. Nothing wrong. No bad feelings. No bad emotions. It's all good. Very good, Moses says.

The third thing is that

Humanity is:

created out of the dust of the ground

made in God’s image

commissioned to fill the earth with God's image by reproducing and creating worship all over the globe

Man and woman are in perfect harmony with their Creator. They and the Son of God walk and talk with perfect conversations. It's all good. They sleep well at night in full confidence that their Creator loves them. There is perfect communion between the Creator and those he created. What a great origin story. The origin of humanity. But that’s not the end of the origins.

God made two special trees.. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve could eat of any tree they wanted to in the garden… except the tree of knowledge of good and evil… Chapter 3 in Genesis says this..

Genesis 3:6 The woman saw that the tree (they had been told not to eat of) 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. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Absolutely devastating. Catastrophic. All of human history rides on that bad decision. What was good, is no longer good. The perfect has been destroyed. There is now sin in the world. This is also part of our origin story. Ever want to know why we have sickness, why we have suffering, why there is evil in the world… why we have war, why we have famine, why we can't get along with our family members, why life is so difficult, why life is so dark at times, why happiness eludes me??

Genesis 3 is the answer. We did this to ourselves. We brought this on ourselves. We have no one to blame but ourselves. This is our story. What was once great is now crash and burn… total failure. What was paradise is paradise no longer… Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden, and the one on one relationship they had with their creator is cut off. Their whole world crashes. As does ours.

And into that mess, into that darkness, into that ruin God speaks words of grace,words of promise:

Genesis 3:15 “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

I will. He will. You will. Promise language. This promise is a curse for the serpent, but a Promise of grace blessing to the man and the woman who had just disobeyed. Unbelievable Grace. And then this act of grace:

The LORD God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them. (Genesis 3:21)

God had promised to kill them if they disobeyed. Instead, an animal dies… and they live to see another day. The covering of the animal is grace… because without that covering they are doomed. Without some kind of satisfaction for disobeying God we all are doomed. This is our story.

This is also our origin story. Adam started the sin problem. God starts the redemption of humanity with a Promise. This story of Adam and Eve and a perfect garden that gets ruined by disobedience to God… God gives a promise… the promise of a Savior who would fix the ruin and restore the communion with God. The seed of the woman would not go without pain… his heel would be bruised by the seed of the serpent, but the end result is that the seed of the woman, this savior would crush the head of the serpent once and for all… in being bruised and broken, the seed of the woman would win it all.

That fix finally does come. After a few thousand years. The author who wrote most of the New Testament sees our story in Adam's story. In Romans 5. The famous missionary Paul says this:

Romans 5:12-19 sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned… from one sin came the judgment, resulting in condemnation… by the one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man… through one trespass there is condemnation for everyone…through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.

We all died in Adam. When Adam sinned, we sinned. We were all made sinners when Adam and Eve ate the fruit. The death of Adam was the death of all of us. My son Luke once said, when he understood this as a 10-year-old… "that's not fair". It’s not fair that our destiny was riding on the line when Adam sinned. That may not seem fair to us, but God in his goodness set it up so that when Adam was eating the fruit, that was us eating the fruit. We were in Adam… and we all died.

It's kind of depressing. All of this sin. All of life's brokenness. All of the bad news we read about and watch on the internet or on TV… it is because we introduced sin into the world. I am a sinner. We all sinned. Like Adam, we're all doomed. We are all divorced from God. We are all destined to live apart from God for all time… unless that seed of the woman is born and crushes the head of the serpent..And that's exactly what happens… listen to the rest of the story in Romans 5:

Romans 5:19 Through one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

And then in the very next chapter:

Romans 6:3-4 All of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.

Wow. There’s the grace that we don’t deserve. When Christ died, I died. When Christ arose, I arose. I deserve eternal damnation, instead… I get all of the paradise and goodness and life… all of the blessings Adam didn’t get, I get all of it. And it all comes to me and is given to me in my baptism. That's my story. I blew it in Adam. I deserve hell in Adam. In my baptism, I die with Christ and I am raised with Christ and I am given new life in baptism.

As we read Genesis this week and into next, we are reading the unfolding of that story… Adam started sin. God starts the story of redemption and that story flows through Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Judah. That story will culminate in Jesus who is FOR YOU in this story. That story finds its way to you and your heart.

Let's pray.

The Table

The garden was the absolute perfection of beauty, and food. Genesis tells us that the garden had rivers and greenery and plenty to eat. It is the life God designed for us. Throughout the Scriptures, bread and wine are pictured as representative of all the goodness and sweetness and beauty and fullness of the garden. This is a picture of not only the garden, but all of creation in its life and vitality. All of life and its meaning are here. Because it’s not just a creation meal, it’s a meal hosted by the seed of the woman whose heel was bruised because of our sin. This creation meal, then, is a new creation meal. Because he died, he offers us forgiveness. And life. And hope. In this meal. The Last Adam is here for us to feed us of himself for our life, and the life of the world.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26

May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.