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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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