Back to the Beginning No.6 not my fault

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Let's turn in the infallible word of God to the third chapter of the book of Genesis. For those of you who don't come here regularly, we're into a series which is creating quite a lot of response in terms of comment and questions and requests for tapes. We've gone right back to the beginning of the Bible because, well, to understand about God and the dilemma of mankind in the 20th century, you really need to start as one of the 20th century musical songs says, you start at the very beginning.

It's a very good place to start. Here is the ABC and it's not a nice story. Well, it was in the first two chapters, but in the third we're in great difficulty.

I've touched on this subject before and taken quite a lot of the material, though I fine-tuned it. I'm representing it because of the requests that have been made for its representation and also because we want to sharpen up the tape that will go into this particular series as we had to break it for reasons some of you know last time. So let's read together, at least you follow, please, from this opening verse of this third chapter where we read these words.

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 of the garden, but God did say you must not eat from the 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. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden, but the Lord God called to the man, where are you? Adam answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked so I hid. And he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.

So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this curse to you, above all the livestock and all the wild animals, you will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers, he will cross your head and you will strike his heel. To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing.

With pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. To Adam he said, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return. It's not within the disposition of man and woman very often to say it was my fault. One of the reasons why I think you have to give credit to Reuben at the end of the book of Genesis or towards the end is because in a family circumstance that developed when Joseph, the unknown Prime Minister of Egypt, that is unknown in identity as far as his brothers were concerned, demanded that Benjamin should be brought to him to demonstrate the truth of the story of the brothers that they were not spies.

Reuben says to the father, Jacob, let Benjamin come with me and if anything goes wrong blame it on me. I myself will guarantee his safety. You can hold me personally responsible for him.

If I do not bring him back to you and set him here before you I will bear the blame before you all my life. Genesis 43 verse 9. When the Bible speaks about the most idyllic condition it does so by describing a condition in which there is no imperfection at all. It speaks of Jesus Christ, for example, in Ephesians chapter 1 and the benefits of his work as applied to sinful people like you and me.

For he chose us, says Paul, Ephesians 1 verse 4, in Christ before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. The best experience that you could ever have, the most remarkable accolade that could ever be directed to you is for you to know purity in the depths of your soul and for God to say you are without blame. But there was only one man who had that experience and of whom it could have been said that he was completely blameless.

In him no sin was found. Our beloved Lord Jesus, what you find however in the third chapter of the book of Genesis is not only the story of Adam, which is the Hebrew for mankind, and Eve, the Hebrew for the mother of the living. What you find encapsulated there in principle is your story, is my story.

There have been tens of thousands, millions of reruns of Genesis 3 and you can never understand yourself. You can never understand society. You can never understand the discipline of sociology or psychology unless you come to a realization that man was flawed almost at the very beginning.

And so when you are confronted with the difficulties that face mankind in the 20th century, the question needs to be raised and it needs to be answered and answered carefully and accurately. Who is to blame? But bless my soul, you look around the world today and you find so many things that are wrong. Read Billy Graham's autobiography and see what he had to say about American society in the last 60, 70 years in which he's lived.

Read our English historians, check Winston Churchill, go through modern times in terms of the depiction of the events of this country. Take a look across the world. Stop down in Zaire.

Have a look, if you please, in the Middle East. Go out to Southeast Asia. Check the kids in Afghanistan, especially those children whose legs have been amputated as a result of landmines.

And incidentally, thank God for the courage of this government in making one of their first steps the abolition of the manufacture of those weapons. But who is to blame? Who is to blame for the human story, for the human tragedy? In this particular chapter, there are four characters, so to speak, four personalities. Let's go to the overhead and I'm going to take them all in one shot and then we'll have the overhead off and come back to it later.

For here in the third chapter of Genesis, you are brought face to face with God the Sovereign whose creation is good. That is what is said in Genesis 1. Good, good, good, good, good. Six times God pronounces things good.

And when he comes to man, he says of man, not just good but very good. The greatest of my phenomenal pieces of creation. And God is here in this account, this narrative, this remarkable insight into early history, the tragedy of a man and a woman falling.

But can you not say that basically God is to blame if he is behind everything? We come back to that in a moment or two. Here also in this particular narrative is the mysterious presentation of the personification of evil, Lucifer himself. He slides alongside in this narrative in the form of a snake.

He is the seducer and his intentions far from being good. Or evil. His target is to eclipse God if it is possible, to rob him of his glory.

Can you not argue, however, that as the story unfurls, if the blame does not rest directly on God who causes the phenomenon of creation, then it must rest on Lucifer, this evil principality who had been expelled from heaven even before the creation of the world and who targets man and woman. The third personality who dominates these verses is none other than Eve. Eve the spouse, the partner, tailor-made, designer constructed by God for man to compliment him, to be his delight.

Eve the spouse, she influences her husband. Therefore, is she not to blame for the tragedy here and for all the repercussions of that tragedy? The third chapter of Genesis is like a pebble that you throw on a pond and the ripples go out throughout the whole course of history and they touch the ends of the earth. Eve the spouse, don't you blame her? Or what about Adam? Adam, who is referred to in the New Testament actually as the Son of God, not in the sense of our Lord Jesus who is uniquely the Son of God, but Adam who is fashioned in God's image.

Now, isn't he the one who is to blame? Or is he right in saying, no, it wasn't me, it was her? And she said, well, it wasn't her, it was the snake. And Lucifer might well have suggested, but after all, God, you were in charge right at the very beginning. Therefore, you're the one to blame.

Now, this is not just a little conundrum that I placard in front of you on a Sunday morning, getting your cogs of your mind working, hoping to involve you in interaction in a sermon. It is that, but it is far more. You see, this is vital.

I mean, you can turn this off just for a moment or two. I mean that unless you have got the answer to this question, who is to blame, then not only are you going to fail to understand the Old Testament and the New Testament, but if Christianity is what it claims to be the credible revelation of God to this world, you're going to fail to comprehend its message. For Christianity speaks to the profundities of life.

Christianity never was for the intellectual cretin. But having said that, a little child with faith can come to an understanding of the essence of the truth. Here in what has been called the most tragic chapter in the whole of the Bible is the story of the fall of man, the problem of man.

It's not a mythological attempt to bring a fanciful narrative together where a snake speaks. It is an attempt to answer the question, how did things go wrong? And when you think in terms of a serpent and a serpent speaking, if God can silence the vocal chords of a man, he can certainly quicken the vocal chords of an animal, if he so wishes. Twice that was done in scripture.

And when you read through the history of Hebrew religion, you discover that the fact of evil and the snake sometimes metaphorically are intertwined. So when you get to the last book of the Bible written by a Hebrew, there's reference to that old dragon, that old serpent. Not so much the literal personification of the devil in the form of a snake, which took place here at Eden, but the principle that in the way that the serpent came and slid alongside in his conniving, in his subtlety, there you get isolated the psychology of the devil as he endeavors to interfere with you and me and to bring to naught the purposes of God.

When did it happen? I mean this fall, this first man and woman who were locked together in a holy ecstatic union, knowing spiritual affinity with God and physical affinity with one another, having such a paradise in which to live and intellectual pursuits to occupy their minds. How long did paradise last? Was it but a few hours or a day or a month? In one sense the question remains unanswered, though it seems to, by implication of the narrative, favor the former several hours than the latter. But the fact is that what went wrong, the aftermath, has lasted now for thousands of years and is the reason for the problems that face so many of us here today.

You know, you American brothers and sisters, you'll find that British culture is quite strange. I mean we have a sort of vested interest in our language and it's amazing how you change it a little bit in the United States. And tomato, for example, we're all tomatoes here.

And the way that we don't have a Senate and a White House and what have you, we've got the Houses of Parliament and most odd things happen in the opening of Parliament. And even when we get rid of one government and put in another one, we're quite brutal about it. Our Chancellor of the Express, Jekyll, he's a guy who looks after the money in our country, which is one of the reasons why we've been in financial difficulty for some years.

Actually, he probably didn't do too bad a job right at the end. But there was a picture of him when we just changed governments, and there was a picture of him hours after the Conservative government was evicted in favor of a Labour government, and there he was in a hired van getting his furniture from next door to 10 Downing Street in, and he was wearing, I must say, to his credit, quite a smile, and he drove off. I mean, it was quite tragic politically as far as his party and his career is concerned.

We're very brutal. I mean, if a man doesn't get the approval of the people, then he's out within hours, out from his house. And the media comes, and they showed us how these politicians had to show a clean pair of heels quite speedily.

I think it's quite disgusting, actually. I think we should do it in a more sophisticated fashion, like the Americans do, and at least give them a period. But you know, an even more brutal thing seems to be, certainly a more tragic thing seems to be, that when you get to the end of this chapter, Adam and Eve are evicted from the garden.

They are driven out by the power of God from the paradise in which they find themselves. And the question that I put to you that we're still trying to answer is, why did all go wrong? Well, let's go back to the thought of God, God the sovereign whose creation is good. John Calvin says, it is an impious madness to attribute to God the creation of any evil and corrupt nature in a world he has pronounced good.

And Calvin is, of course, right. But when God created, as I tried to demonstrate last time we touched on this subject matter, when God creates man in the beginning, the very freedom bespeaks the choice of being able to work alongside the declared will of God or to reject it. Creation in its original brings with it the possibility, indeed the certainty, of free will.

And this is what Adam had. And in those first two chapters, arguably, this is the only case in human history when you can say of man that he is perfectly free. Adam could not have said, as David bemoaned, in sin did my mother conceive me, because he had no sin.

You are born with a bias and therefore your freedoms are restricted. But this was not the case for Adam. And for this universe which God has created and for this man and woman to engage in intercourse with God in this universe and to fulfill his purposes, then just at the level of plain morality and ethics, there has to be the possibility of doing what God does not want.

And there needs to be a test. And the test is given in form of this tree, this fruit. The tree and the fruit themselves are totally inconsequential.

It's no use writing an essay on this. What is here is a test. What is at stake is not the biting of an apple or any fruit at all.

What is at stake is will Adam, who bears the image of God, flow along with the purposes of God, or will he raise his fist against God? And if you say that God should not have given him that capacity, then you are saying that God has no right to make anyone in his image. And if he creates in his image, there is the potentiality for rebellion. So Calvin is quite right when he says that it is madness to attribute to God the responsibility for what goes wrong.

God as Creator makes the options plain to Adam and to Eve. And let me say this just to disabuse you of any notion that since the fall, therefore, you are not responsible. He still holds you responsible for the actions that you take.

You too will be accountable to God as Adam was accountable to God. And it is no use trying to bring up some petty, fogging excuse that if you'd been born in this generation, if you'd have had that mother or that father, if your genetic code had been different, then you would not be responsible. Therefore, you would have been different.

Therefore, now you're not responsible. God will not allow that. That's the language of psychology.

It's always the language of eyewash. Having said that, some people are better advantaged than others. And that is always brought into mind when God makes his judgment and hands out the rewards.

But the fact is that as you spotlight God in this chapter, the sovereign who has created what is good, he most certainly is not responsible for what goes wrong. Well, what about Lucifer? Lucifer, the seducer whose intentions are evil. In the language and indeed in the practice of computer science, those of us who have been coerced into it, who resisted it for a long time but then had to get involved because, well, there was so much that you couldn't tap in terms of information without.

Those who know a little bit about it may have come across a program called Dr. Solomon. You see, what can happen to a computer is this. A computer can get a virus.

I always thought that viruses were something you got in your body until about a few years ago when I realized you could get it in a computer. And the way to stop your virus is by getting a program like Dr. Solomon and it blocks out the problems of software and so forth. If you're completely confused at this stage, then that's fine.

About 80% of the congregation are too. Just accept it from me that computers can have viruses directed against them as human bodies can have viruses directed against them as can the human soul. Lucifer in the form of a servant slides alongside Adam and Eve in this wonderful garden setting.

And his name, Lucifer the Shining One, also has other names which are less stunning. Diablos, the Devil, the Great Satan, whose desire is to inject into the human species a virus against which there is no block, against which there is no guard. Why does Lucifer target Eve and Adam? The reason is quite clear.

His main battle is not with man. His main battle is with God. If I presented correctly the fact that there are two creations that are described in Scripture, the creations within the earth and the creations within the heavenlies, then you will remember my comment that Lucifer was expelled from heaven as a result of his pride wanting to take upon himself divine honors.

And when he is expelled from the heavens, he finds himself in the corridor of darkness betwixt heaven and this earth and this universe which God has made. Now what distinguishes man from the rest of the animal creation? And the fact is that man is born in the image of God. So if you can't penetrate heaven again, come alongside the closest that there is in the universe to God and it is none other than man.

Eclipse God's glory as far as man is concerned and it's one in the eye for God. And that's what you have here, brothers and sisters, in Genesis chapter 3. Lucifer directing his venom seemingly at man but actually targeting God. And if the goal is God, the guile is in the malevolent fashion in which the devil targets man and woman and he abuses creation and creation order in so doing.

You say, what do you mean? Well, who was made first? And the answer is Adam was made first. Who was given federal headship? And the answer is Adam. Adam is to look after the animal world.

He's not to do that as a tyrant, he has creation responsibilities. Adam has responsibilities for his wife, Adam first. Eve will complement but Adam will in one sense be the head.

Now here is this temptation in this garden, to which order does the devil submit? And the answer is he submits to his own order which is a reversal of creation principles. He comes not at Adam, he comes at Eve and he speaks to Eve and he entices Eve and foolishly she listens to him. He preaches a sermon which is an anti-evangelistic sermon.

He injects doubt as God says. He engages in character assassination. God has precluded you from that fruit because he knows that if you eat it, it will be so good for you, it will lift you up to a level that he is at.

And into the interrogation there is the opium inserted that Eve has right to pass judgment on the revealed word of God. Listen, if you're feeling comfortable at this point because this is history and not contemporary times, listen to Luther. We all carry about with us material that Satan can work upon.

I more fear what is within than what comes from without. Listen to John Wesley. Worst of all my foes, I fear the enemy within.

You see man is not just a pawn on a cosmic chessboard. You cannot just pity Eve and pity Adam and say that they have no degree of responsibility. You cannot engage in a sort of Muslim theology and put it all back to the idea of fate and the will of Allah.

Here is Lucifer endeavoring to corrupt the mind of Eve. Here is Eve who listens to what he has to say instead of immediately going to Adam. Here is the inversion of creation principles and as a result things go wrong and terribly, terribly wrong.

And we spotlight Eve, the spouse who influences her husband. And Eve is seduced by the devil because of the devil's confusion. The way in which he confuses creation order and Eve doesn't realize the malevolent way in which he's dealing the blows.

And she is seduced by the devil's communion. Listen. God knows that when you eat of it, Eve, your eyes will be opened and you'll 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 and she ate. The devil's communion in Eden at the beginning of time, he attacks the woman, ignores the federal headship of God, and Eve fails to realize that Adam and therefore her have authority over the snake, have authority over the animals. But she listens to the voice of Lucifer who seduces her.

She sees, she touches, she takes, she eats. The communion of the devil. And God will have to become man and die a horrible death on a cruel cross before the taking and eating shall become verbs of salvation and not damnation.

And that's the reason why in Scripture you find in 2 Corinthians 11 and 3 and 1 Timothy 2 and 13, then these references are listed for pastoral group leaders who are going to take some discussion on this on Wednesday, why Eve is suggested to have the larger of the guilt or seemingly so, marginally so, inasmuch as she was the first to disobey. And she takes what she has learned and she takes the fruit that she has and she brings it to Adam. And so we turn the spotlight upon Adam moving from Eve the spouse who influences her husband to Adam the son whose image is broken.

It's not easy to withstand a woman as attractive as Eve. Eve is on a par intellectually with Adam. Eve is to Adam as his own heart is to himself.

Eve is a tantalizing woman, an attractive woman. They have a remarkable relationship and she speaks and gives to her husband. Listen to Milton in Paradise Lost, he's scrupled not to eat against his better knowledge, not deceived but fondly overcome with female charm.

Adam, who is God's son and who will know the breaking of God's image as he resorts to the same malpractice as Eve and disobeys God. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened.

They realized that they were naked so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. At that moment when they thought they would enter into life and be raised to the pedestal of divinity, they actually enter into the era of death and decay. And the joy that they felt in the presence of God in this paradise will now be changed and there will be embarrassment.

Embarrassment between the two of them. Embarrassment between themselves and God. And at the close of the day, with presumably several hours passing, we hear the voice of God, a voice of pain, as he cries out, Adam, where are you? And Adam, with this attempt to cover up his sin, these fig leaves, these manufactured aprons, he does something he's never needed to do before.

He hides from the Lord and God calls him to book and he says, have you disobeyed me? And Adam says, yes, but God, it was a woman who gave me the fruit and you put the woman in the garden. And here you see is the first reaction, not of man in sin, but man talking to God without the realization that he has to confess his sin. And it will take some time before the human race comes to a realization that the only remedy for open rebellion is the acknowledgement of the guilt that they have incurred.

An excuse is offered, but the excuse is rejected. And when you read in the New Testament, men and women recognize this, when you read of the tragedy of Eden, we are told that it was by one man's sin. You see, there is no way in which Adam can excuse himself because of Eve.

They are so close together. The difference in the rebellion is so marginal that when the theologians of the New Testament look back to the tragedy of the fall, they credit the tragedy to Adam as being the federal head of the race. As in Adam, all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

So let's come to the conclusion and put back the overheads. Who is to blame? God, the sovereign whose creation is good? No. Lucifer, the seducer whose intentions are evil? To blame, yes, inasmuch as he releases the venom of sin, but you cannot stop there in directing the blame.

You bring to the spotlight Eve, the spouse who influences her husband. She has to bear a measure of the responsibility, but you also find Adam, the son whose image is shattered. His excuse was attempted, but the excuse was rejected.

So what are the solitary lessons that you learn? You have to learn that the buck stops with man, the buck stops with you, it stops with me. The rerun of Eden, you've experienced it in your own life, but if the buck of responsibility stops with you, the grace for recovery stops with God. And God in his grace will speak to Adam, he will speak to Eve, he will curse the earth, he will curse the serpent, but he will speak of a greater grace than the rebellion that there was within the sin.

Because God who is totally sovereign can take the tragedy of Eden, can take the machinations of Lucifer and his evil, can take the seductive influence of Eve which was used wrongly towards her husband, can take the disobedience of Adam with his shattered image, and yet bring it about for his own good and for his own glory, and send into this world someone who is greater than Adam, a second Adam, to the rescue came. And now we know that we can take bread and wine, take and eat, not of that which is forbidden, but that which is given us as the fruit of salvation through our Lord Jesus, and the verbs of damnation have become the verbs of salvation. But more of that next week.

Let's pray. Father we thank you for your grace, grace so free, grace so wonderful, grace directed to the undeserving. Pardon there was multiplied to me, there my burdened soul found liberty at Calvary.

Lord you drove out from your presence our first parents, but we hear the voice of Jesus saying come, come unto me. We thank you that the repulsion of Eden is counterbalanced by the attraction of Calvary. Blessed God help us to live out our lives within the parameters of these principles for Jesus' sake.

Amen. Amen. Let's have a final hymn and I think we'll go to 784.

And those of you who've got children you probably want to slip out and get the kiddies at this point. You servants of God your master proclaim and publish abroad his wonderful name. Speaking of the solution again to the human tragedy through Jesus Christ which needs to be proclaimed around the globe.

784. His kingdom, his glory, his power, his truth, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness, his righteousness O come, all ye faithful, and worship the Lord