The Beginning of Sin and Suffering

Theme for 2022 is “Begin Again”

In this eight-part series is called “In the Beginning,” I thought it would be good for us to reset our thinking by going all the way back to the beginning.

Lets look at how God began everything and how God begins

again.

We talked about how God created time and space.

He created beauty from chaos and order from nothingness.

God created the world good and designed life to reproduce and to multiply His goodness throughout the earth.

Mankind was the crowning glory of his creation.

Both male and female were made in His image and represent Him.

Most of all we learned that to be human is to be created for relationship -fellowship with God and with each other.

Before sin entered the picture, humanity was enjoying a time of innocence.

Do you remember what it was like to be innocent?

What are your earliest memories? What kind of things were you concerned about? Not getting along with other children? Afraid of the dark? Maybe a neighborhood bully?

A study was release in 2000 that has studies childhood anxiety from 1952 to 1993 and concluded that childhood anxiety was rising rapidly.

“The average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s” (Actual quote from the article)

Some reasons that were given for the rise was social disconnectedness due to rising divorce rates, exposure to violence and crime in the media and economic hardship which creates tension in the home.

It appears that things may have gone from bad to worse in the last few years.

In the first year of the pandemic, the World Health Organization reported that global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a whopping 25%!

So where did things go wrong?

Why so much fear, anxiety and depression?

If God is good, why do we have pain and suffering?

Suffering is the result of sin - the opposite of God’s goodness.

The chaos that was in the world before creation got to humanity and infected them with it’s nature.

We now live in a fallen world with problems that God never intended.

If we go back to the beginning and look at where and how things went wrong, perhaps we will also see how things can me made right?

God went to great lengths to redeem the world through Jesus Christ His Son.

But suffering persists, mostly because we persist in the very things that cause and perpetuate suffering.

God is in the business of restoring humanity and the world.

But to see what that looks like, we need to go back to the beginning.

Suffering and sin come from disobedience.

The biblical story begins with a perfect world and ends with a restored world, but in between something happens.

God creates people and puts them in charge of His world.

God put them in a garden, on a mountain top where they have continual fellowship with God.

There are no barriers between God and man or between man and woman.

Genesis 2:25 AMP

25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not embarrassed or ashamed in each other’s presence.

God created humanity for relationship, to love and to be loved.

But in order for love to be genuine, there must also be free-will.

You can’t make someone love you.

Any effort to control or manipulate the other is going to create barriers.

Part of love is choice.

If you can choose to love you can also choose not to.

God gives people the choice to obey.

Genesis 2:15–17 ESV

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Every relationship is tested through choices that we make.

We communicate our thoughts, feelings and desires and people choose how they will respond.

In responding, people are also communicating something about themselves by how they choose to respond.

And then we have a choice as to how we will respond to other people’s responses.

This back and forth communication is the way we relate - it can either go well or it can go poorly.

Every response is a choice.

When telling the story of the fall, we often begin with God saying “don’t eat of the tree!”

When we tell it that way, we are twisting the story and making God look mean, which is also what the serpent did.

Before God tells them not to eat, He tells them to eat of any tree in the garden.

The Hebrew says the word “eat” twice, like your grandma “Eat, eat!”

God is generous and gracious.

There is even a tree of life which reinforces the idea that God gives life freely.

The tree of life is not restricted, you can have life, abundant and eternal, as much as you need or want!

Oh, and by the way, there is one tree that will kill you.

It’s called the “knowledge of good and evil.”

We know what good is, but what is evil?

Why does there even have to be evil?

Because in order for something to be what it is, there has to be an opposite.

In order for love to exist, there has to be the possibility of rejection.

God created light against the backdrop of darkness.

Beauty and goodness and what you get when God steps into the chaos.

Relationship with God is only possible if there is at least a theoretical possibility of something else - another choice.

Evil was always a possibility, but why would anyone choose evil among so many wonderful choices?

They had help - they were deceived!

Genesis 3:1–3 ESV

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 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.’ ”

Deception begins with doubting God.

The serpent was not just an ordinary snake.

There is a whole back story elsewhere in the Bible about a prominent heavenly being who became prideful and turned evil and led a rebellion against God.

Rather than mention this being by name, he shows up in the story as a talking serpent, but there is a spiritual meaning behind it.

The first thing we hear from the serpent is “Did God actually say?”

Combine that with a subtle exaggeration (Did God really say not to eat from any tree in the garden?) .

The first step toward deception is to get you to doubt what you think you know.

Is God real?

Does God really care?

Can you trust what God says?

Could God be holding out on them?

Eve doesn’t fall for it, at least not right away.

She corrects the serpent, but then she responds with her own exaggeration about the tree they were not allowed to eat from.

“God said not to touch it!’

Eve knows that the serpent is wrong, but then she begins her own exaggeration - talking just like the serpent.

Even thought she didn’t fully buy it, the lie began to twist her thinking.

The deception of sin is to get you to distrust the Word of God so that you take matters into your own hands.

Whether you believe the lie or not, you have doubts where there was once trust.

satan didn’t need to prove God wrong, he just needed to create a reasonable doubt.

It’s the power of suggestion, once an idea is “out there” you can’t take it back.

The problem with doubting God, is that in doubting, you become the authority to yourself.

You take God’s place in your own mind.

Disobedience culminates with playing God.

Genesis 3:4–5 ESV

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

The fall of man kind was not just about a piece of fruit.

It was about obedience and disobedience.

It was about sowing a seed of defiance that would eventually be reaped.

It was about mankind deciding for himself what good and evil should be.

They already knew good, so it was the choice to know evil, and once you know something you can’t not know it.

It was about spiritual realities and opening a door that would not be able to be shut until God himself in human flesh would demonstrate radical obedience to God.

Coming to Jesus is first of all admitting that He is God and you are not God.

The sinful nature is basically selfish.

Every human being since Adam and Even has this selfish sinful nature.

We want what we want, and sometimes we don’t even know why except because we want it.

We struggle to trust other human beings because they let us down.

And we struggle to trust God because we project our human experiences onto Him.

Jesus came and died to show us a better way.

It’s the way of the cross.

Its the way of dying to self and living for God.

It’s the way of living by the Spirit and not walking according to the flesh.

Every time we disobey, we are choosing to trust ourselves over God.

The problem with trusting ourselves is that we can’t trust others.

What we can’t trust, we must control…somehow.

The need to control fuels our anxiety, ruins our relationships and makes us act out in violence.

You need to stop and ask yourself, “What do I really want?”

People suffer from sin according to their desire.

To understand sin and suffering better, lets look through the lens of desire.

God’s goal for humanity is not that we cease to desire, but that our desires would be what they were before sin entered the picture.

Sin twists our desires toward self, instead of toward God and others.

As we look at this next verse, notice how the lie - doubting God’s character - twists our desires away from God.

And then you have to ask yourself, “how to I untwist them?”

Genesis 3:6 ESV

6 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 of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

First notice that this wasn’t Eve acting alone.

Adam was there with her.

Adam was the one to whom God spake about the tree in Gen 2:17.

Adam is complicit in his silence.

Maybe he was just watching to see what would happen?

What satisfies you?

“She saw that the tree was good for food.”

They say if you touch a plant to your lips and there is no burning or itching after several minutes it may be edible.

If you take a small bite and hold it in you mouth and it tastes bitter or soapy them spit it out. If not, it is most likely edible.

I don’t know if that is what Eve did, but by whatever means, she determined that it was edible?

Strange thought, I don’t think she would have ever experienced a non-edible plant.

The unspoken lie that Adam and Eve bought into was the possibility that God was withholding some good from them.

Suddenly, every good thing that God had given them was not enough.

God was no longer sufficient and neither were they.

They began to long for something that they did not have.

They became unsatisfied.

Curiosity is a kind of hunger.

You want to know and experience everything there is.

But you don’t know where the line is to regret until you have crossed it.

As long as you are willing to trust the word of another, you may avoid some bad experiences.

But every new experience has tantalizing possibilities.

The desire of hunger or for something that satisfies causes me to ask:

What satisfies you?

Can you be satisfied?

Or does every new experience leave you wanting something more?

I think it is good to have a holy unsatisfaction, in that we know that there is more of God than we have experience up until now.

But that’s just it, are we hungry for more of God (which is satisfying)or just trying to fill a bottomless hole of inordinate desire (which is unsatisfying)?

Let me ask you another way...

What appeals to you?

“and that it was a delight to the eyes.”

So much of advertising these days is just “eye candy.”

Make something look attractive and people will want it.

When’s the last time you bought something that actually looked like the picture?

Did you know that most of the models in magazines don’t even look like their pictures?

That’s right, they are “airbrushed” or photo-shopped to look like we think they should look - perfect

The problem with desire and appeal is that is causes us to create a fantasy image of what we are desiring.

That model only exists in your imagination.

Pornography only exists in your imagination.

Even the hamburger you order from McDonald’s looks better and tastes better in your imagination.

Forbidden fruit tastes better in the imagination than in reality.

Sin twists our minds into wanting what is not even real.

I once worked in a factory where I only knew one other Christian in the plant. The other guys would keep pornography around in the break room. My friend and I would put it aside. He was married, and I was dating the girl who would later be my wife.

One day one of the guys held a centerfold right in my friends face and said, “I’ll bet your wife doesn’t look like that!”

My friend quietly replied, “No, my wife doesn’t look like that. But I, like the way my wife looks. So what do I need this for?”

Real relationships are based on reality, not fantasy.

We see each other will all our imperfection and idiosyncrasies, but it’s all beautiful because its uniquely you.

God came down to our imperfect world a related to us, not as a fantasy character, but as a real person.

Isaiah 53:2 CSB

2 He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He didn’t have an impressive form or majesty that we should look at him, no appearance that we should desire him.

What is attractive to you - “eye candy” or genuine reality?

God says you are beautiful just because you are created in his image.

You are most attractive when you reflect the goodness of God.

What motivates you?

“the tree was desired to make one wise”

Ambition is the desire to achieve.

Ambition can be good if it driven by the motivation to become all that God intended us to be.

But when it is driven by feelings of emptiness or inadequacy, the pursuit of success and fulfillment becomes a never-ending quest.

the Danish storyteller H.C. Andersen tells the story of some men who swindled a king by making clothes for him our of thread that could only be seen by those who are truly wise. Well, everyone including the king wanted to be wise, so they played along as if they could see this fine clothing that the king was supposedly wearing.

It wasn’t until a child cried out, “the king has no clothes!” They every one realized who was wise and who had been fooled.

It’s the same with selfish ambition, everyone acts like all of their pretending is really getting them somewhere until someone finally has the clarity to declare it meaningless.

Do you really need to make more money than what you need to live on?

Do you really need a big house and all the toys that you never have time to enjoy?

What good is it to make a name for yourself if you loose the respect of those closest to you?

It might be a good time to see if what you are “wearing” really has substance?

We learned last week that we were created for relationship with God and others.

We reflect God and God is love.

Sin and suffering causes us to focus on ourselves, our own survival and advancement rather than loving and being loved.

1 John 2:15–17 ESV

15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. 17 And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Sin causes us to desire what we would not want if we only knew the love of God.

And the opposite is true - when you know the love of the Father those desires fade away.

So the enemy’s strategy is to keep us stuck in those desires and disconnected.

That is another kind of suffering - the suffering of separation from God and others.

Sin causes people to suffer separately.

Genesis 3:7 ESV

7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

One thing that the serpent said was not a lie, their eyes were opened.

They saw good and evil and they suddenly saw themselves and each other as “not good.”

They had both crossed the line and now that line was a barrier between them and between them and God.

Sin places people at odds with each other.

Have you ever felt betrayed - like you thought you knew someone only to find out that they were not who you thought they were.

You can never look at them the same way again.

Adam and Eve obviously were not looking at each other the same way because they had to make clothes for themselves.

They felt shame - remorse for themselves and perhaps disgust for the other.

Instead of feeling loved, they felt used.

The thrill was gone, but they were stuck with each other.

Relationships are hard when the other person is seen as an obstacle to your own personal fulfillment.

Adam and Eve are still going to be fruitful and multiply, but now it is with pain as a byproduct.

Genesis 3:16 ESV

16 To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

Also the part about a woman’s desire being for her husband is probably more correctly translated here as being “against” him.

Men and women have different desires for what they want from each other and from life and they often conflict.

The result of sin is not just women fawning over men, but women and men in perpetual conflict.

And that not the only conflict resulting from sin....

Sin created disharmony between humanity and their environment.

Genesis 3:17–19 ESV

17 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; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 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.”

Before sin, Adam’s work was a pleasure, but then it became a chore.

Adam had life, which was not just in Adam but also in the environment around him.

Now the life in Adam was compromised and conflicted.

And the environment was also impacted - there are now both good and bad plants.

God’s goodness was supposed to reproduce and fill the earth.

But not there are both good and bad seed, both in mankind and in the earth.

Both are reproducing themselves in the earth - and its not going to get sorted out until the end (See the parable of the wheat ant eh tares).

Back to the question of why there is pain and suffering in the world:

Because humanity chose the knowledge of good and evil - and with it evil was unleashed.

Humanity chose to decide for themselves what would be good and what would be evil.

Good is what God is - but when we are acting like we are god, we start to call evil good.

And sometime we even go so far as to call what is good - evil.

It’s all messed up because we are so mixed up.

There is only one way to sort it out - get back to being in relationship with God.

But that’s another problem...

Sin separated humanity from the presence of God.

Genesis 3:22–24 ESV

22 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 take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 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 way to the tree of life.

If God had not banished Adam and Eve from the garden, they could have immortalized their sinful state.

Death is the only remedy for sin.

It’s not just a punishment its a result - sin leads to death.

But death is also part of the remedy for sin.

Jesus Christ would come to earth, suffer and die to break the power of sin and death.

So that now we do have eternal life, but without sin and suffering.

When we die in Christ, we go straight into His presence to be with Him forever.

But you don’t have to wait until you die to have eternal life.

When you receive Christ and the Holy Spirit inside you, that life is more powerful than the remnants of sin.

Root out those thorns and thistles which belong to the old sinful nature and cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.

Since we have this knowledge of good and evil, why not use it to defeat evil with good?

Recognize that good is whatever God is and evil is what God is not.

Then spend time learning to know God, reading His Word and learning to follow His Spirit.

Learn to love God and love others the way that God loved them.

Sin and suffering will be with us until God is finished restoring the earth.

But we are not focused on that.

We are not abandoning our desires, but redirecting them back to God and to what God intended for us from the beginning.

Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth with God’s goodness.

Questions for reflection:

Do you know good from evil? Have you recognized where your life has been infected with sin? Have you applied the remedy of Christ’s death on your behalf?

What are your desires? What do you really want out of life and your relationships? What would happen if you align your desires with God’s desire for humanity?

Are there barriers between yourself and others or between yourself and God? It there disharmony in your environment? How might renewing the connection between you and God help you in your relationship with others and in your surroundings?