Sermon Tone Analysis

/Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”/

/The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”/

/“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”/

/When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it/.

One of the surest indications that mankind is fallen race is our denial of sinfulness.

Our propensity for self-deceit is evidence that we are incapable of pleasing God.

Even the best of us, those who are redeemed by the mercies of our Lord and given access into His grace, find ourselves entertaining flitting thoughts that we please God.

The Bible is unified in presenting this singular thought that we cannot please God.

Our best efforts are, however, utterly self-serving and contaminated with self.

This should not lead us to despair nor to conclude that since we cannot please God we should cease trying to honour Him in all things.

Our strength is limited and we are weak, but in Him we enjoy great strength.

Our desires are contaminated except when they find their origin in Him.

Our efforts are self-serving except when we move at His command.

Thus we dare not permit ourselves to slip into the dismal trap of a hedonistic life view.

Instead, we must discover the will of the Lord through diligently seeking Him, and then we must draw on His strength to do His will while relying on His grace.

How did this fall into exaltation of self occur?

What tragic occurrence lies behind our current condition?

The account of mankind’s plunge into sin and the consequent ruin of all creation is recorded in the *third chapter of Genesis*.

Join me in exploring the divine chronicle so that together we may grasp the enormity of our first parent’s sin and the awesome magnitude of the grace of our God.

*Dying You Shall Die* — In *Genesis 2:15-17* we are provided an account of God’s provision for Adam together with the warning which the Lord God had issued to him.

/The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”/

The divine warning is exceptionally pointed.

The final clause (/you will surely die/) could be literally translated into English as *dying you die*.

In other words death as a process would reign over man replacing life which he had known to this point.

God gave the strongest possible warning that something heretofore unknown would result from disobedience which would accompany rebellion.

Man knew the consequences of rebellion against God, which makes the rebellion all the worse.

What does it mean to be fallen?

Theologians speak of man as totally depraved.

This does not mean that man cannot be nice.

Neither does it mean that man cannot be civil.

Given proper incentive societies can and do construct codes of conduct which set boundaries for acceptable behaviour.

Even the most degraded of individuals can, at times, demonstrate what appears to be benevolent acts.

What does it mean, then, to say that man is fallen and is incapable of pleasing God in his own strength?

When theologians speak of the fall of man, they are describing the situation which led to our condition of total depravity.

When speaking of total depravity we enter the realm of the spiritual.

Theologians speaking of total depravity are saying that no act performed by any of the descendants of Adam is utterly selfless.

This is because that in the Fall our first parents challenged the supremacy of the Lord God, thinking they could replace Him on the throne of life.

No individual can live a life which is fully pleasing to God.

Even the most gracious of acts, the most careful observance of religious duty, is tainted with elements of self.

Thus, no man can please God by human efforts.

Were our actions alone affected by sin it would be tragic enough, but the teaching of the Word of God is that even our thoughts are sullied and contaminated by self.

Were God to fail to extend grace toward His fallen creature, man could neither know God nor hope to please Him.

The reason this is so extends back to the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

When God said man would die the process would of necessity touches every aspects of man’s being.

You will remember that when we addressed the manner in which man is created in the image of God we discovered that man is a tripartite being.

That is, man possesses a body, but he is a living soul.

He is also a spiritual being created to know God and to commune with Him.

However, in the Fall of the progenitors of the race death touched every facet of human being.

Therefore, our bodies are dying from conception.

Through the input of energy we can momentarily overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics and actually appear to grow.

This growth is at the expense of energy, however.

Should we cease to drain energy from the universe we physically die, and that is eventually what happens to the whole race.

It is one thing to speak of physical death as the failure to convert energy into matter and the return of the body back to the earth, but what is death?

We know that death is fundamentally a separation.

The soul is separated from the body and we speak of that separation as death.

Man is a living soul.

To speak of man’s soul being alive is to know that it is united to the source of all life, which is God.

Man, however, as a fallen being is not related to God and his soul is dead since it is separated from God.

Should man physically die without ever having his soul united to the Living God, that man is eternally dead.

This is the reason the Word of God speaks of those who are lost as being /dead in transgressions and sins/ [cf.

*Ephesians 2:1-3*].

Likewise, the spirit of fallen man is separate from God and thus the spirit is also dead.

Instantly with Adam’s rebellion his spirit was dead to God and the spirit of every member of the race since that time has been born dead in transgressions and sins.

The soul is dead to God and the body is born under sentence of death.

Dying, we die.

Our alienation from God is total.

Our fallen condition has plunged us into a state from which we cannot find our way back into the presence of God except we should be aided by His Holy Spirit.

This is the meaning of *Romans 3:10-12*.

As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;

there is no one who understands,

no one who seeks God.

All have turned away,

they have together become worthless;

there is no one who does good,

not even one.”

Consider what this singular passage is telling us.

Three terms stand out in these verses: righteousness; understanding; seeking.

Though we perhaps challenge these verses by stating that we know people who are not as bad as they can be we must also confess that no one is as good as they ought to be.

When we think about mankind we know that from the standpoint of God man is not righteous.

The death of the spirit has ensured that we shall never be sufficiently good, never be adequately holy, to compare ourselves to God.  Sin has taken from us this innocence as we saw in an earlier study.

Likewise our intellect is affected by our fallen condition.

Though we have understanding in some areas and though collectively we have great understanding as demonstrated by the advance of technology, we nevertheless fail to understand the will of God.

This is the meaning of Paul’s words in *1 Corinthians 2:14*.

/The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned/.

Of our former condition when we were without Christ in the world, Paul reminds us: /you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking.

They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more/ [*Ephesians** 4:17b-19*].

Lastly, the Romans text informs us that our will is affected adversely.

We do not seek after God.

The meaning is not only that we are incapable of coming to God because of our sin and His righteousness and not only are we incapable of understanding Him because His way can only be discerned by the aid of His Holy Spirit, but we don’t even want to approach God!  Most people do seek a god!  However they seek a god of their own making and not the Lord God their Creator.

Most people recognise a spiritual vacuum in their lives and seek to fill that void with something.

This is Jesus’ meaning in *John 6:44*, No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

David recognised his dreadful condition when he was threatened with loss of intimacy with God and he wrote this pathetic admission.

Surely I was sinful at birth,

sinful from the time my mother conceived me.