3:1 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, ‘You1 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.’” 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.” 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,2 she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 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.
8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool3 of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”410 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring5 and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
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 to6 your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
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.”
20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.721 And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
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.
Footnotes
[1]3:1In Hebrew you is plural in verses 1–5 [2]3:6Or to give insight [3]3:8Hebrew wind [4]3:9In Hebrew you is singular in verses 9 and 11 [5]3:15Hebrew seed; so throughout Genesis [6]3:16Or shall be toward (see 4:7) [7]3:20Eve sounds like the Hebrew for life-giver and resembles the word for living
3:1 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, ‘You1 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.’” 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.” 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,2 she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 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.
8 And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool3 of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”410 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring5 and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
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 to6 your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
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.”
20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.721 And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.
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.
Footnotes
[1]3:1In Hebrew you is plural in verses 1–5 [2]3:6Or to give insight [3]3:8Hebrew wind [4]3:9In Hebrew you is singular in verses 9 and 11 [5]3:15Hebrew seed; so throughout Genesis [6]3:16Or shall be toward (see 4:7) [7]3:20Eve sounds like the Hebrew for life-giver and resembles the word for living
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:
The, message tonight is from Genesis chapter 3. Feel free to, read along with me. 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? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, 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.
Speaker 1:
But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die 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 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. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Speaker 1:
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. He said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree which I commanded you not to eat?
Speaker 1:
The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you have done? And the woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
Speaker 1:
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and and you shall bruise his heel. To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
Speaker 1:
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. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you and you shall eat the plants of the field. 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.
Speaker 1:
The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the lord god made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. The Lord God said, behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now lest he reach out his hand and and also take of the tree of life and eat and live forever. Therefore, the Lord God sent him out of the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
Speaker 1:
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.
Jeffrey Heine:
Pray with me. Lord, we thank you for your word, how it is true, how it is relevant. We never outgrow it. I pray through your spirit we won't be able to outrun it, escape from it. Lord, my words are death, your words are life, and we need life in this place.
Jeffrey Heine:
So I pray that my words would fall to the ground and that they would blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, let your words remain and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. Have you ever noticed how people love to give sweeping statements, generalizations about what they perceive to be wrong, especially what's wrong with the world?
Jeffrey Heine:
How often have you heard somebody say, hey, you know what's wrong with this world? And every time it's something different, you know, the the answers are always different. Maybe it's what's wrong with this world is corrupt governments. What's wrong with this world is education. No, it's it's high taxes.
Jeffrey Heine:
And everybody kinda disagrees, but they all have their own viewpoints that that something's wrong. At least they agree with that. Something is wrong with this world. GK Chesterton was once asked by a student, what is wrong with this world? And he answered, me.
Jeffrey Heine:
Me. And it shocked everyone. Well, when he said, I am what is wrong with this world. And he probably could have added, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you. But he said, me.
Jeffrey Heine:
Something is fundamentally wrong with me. I've thought a lot about what we should be teaching in the few weeks that we're doing the series on doctrines that we hold dearly because this is a huge topic. And I thought about jumping over the fall, but so many of our Christian doctrines are based on the fall. And I I was even thinking about our name, Redeemer Community Church, and that redemption has kind of been a theme of this church. What do we want to be redeemed from?
Jeffrey Heine:
What are we declaring redemption from? What's, what's wrong? And it seems to me we need to have a good understanding of what we see is wrong with this world if we're gonna preach the redemption of this world. So I thought we needed to take at least a week to look at this. Now now there's many people, there's many religions and philosophies is a terrible mistake.
Jeffrey Heine:
It's actually a great hindrance to people. It can kill one's inspiration, destroy one's vision. They believe in something called, tathagatagarba. Just phonetically spell that. It means one's basic goodness.
Jeffrey Heine:
That each person is basically good at the core, And our our life goal is simply we gotta uncover this goodness that's that's innate in all of us. Islam also rejects the idea of original sin. Most Western Christians don't know this, but but one of the main reasons that that, Muslims reject the gospel is they actually don't see a need for it. They don't see a need for a great sacrifice to cover over this sin. They don't believe in a sin nature.
Jeffrey Heine:
Philosophers have been greatly divided over this notion of original sin. You have Thomas Hobbes, of course, who believed it, that we were intensely selfish from birth. And it was the the job of governments or teachers to help control all of these selfish egoists. In the 18th century, Jean Jacques Rousseau on the other hand, he believed that children were had this intuitive sense of right and wrong. They were born doing good, and and he he would say that they were noble savages, that they had an innate purity.
Jeffrey Heine:
Then you have John Locke on the other hand who said that, children are born with no tendencies at all. They can become anything. It's only with the people around them who shape their morals. Well I want us to look at what the Bible says about our condition. Who are we?
Jeffrey Heine:
What, if anything, is wrong with us? And if so, what can save us? Let's look at Genesis 3. The very first verse says, now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord had made. And right off the bat you get all these questions, where did the serpent come from, how can it talk, you know, where did evil come from, there's there's all these questions that merely come, and the author is not interested in answering those questions.
Jeffrey Heine:
This text is not about this. The the text isn't about the serpent, it's about us. And that's what he wants us to concentrate on, is us. We don't know where the serpent came from. It's not really important to the story.
Jeffrey Heine:
What the serpent says is important to the story. He approaches the woman and and he asked, did God actually say you shall not eat from any tree of the garden? Now you gotta understand, this is not a genuine question. He's not being sincere at this point, he's actually scoffing at God's command. Really he's saying, did God really tell you that you can't eat from any of these trees?
Jeffrey Heine:
Did he really say that? He's mocking this command, and he's mocking the people that would obey such a command. He's snickering at them. And this mocking is still very effective today. And, you know, most non Christians that I know of that are hostile to the gospel, they never really ask genuine questions.
Jeffrey Heine:
They really don't wanna know what you believe. They they don't wanna enter into some kind of rational logical argument. They just wanna mock what you believe. They wanna mock what I believe. They wanna go for the heart.
Jeffrey Heine:
Go for the emotion. Because that's highly effective in getting people to doubt their faith. You don't honestly believe that Jesus is the son of God, do you? That's not an argument. That's just some mocking.
Jeffrey Heine:
You you know, I mean, you really think the bible is true? Do you really believe the Bible is true? It's not an argument. They're mocking, and it's highly effective. We we often crumble under just such a sneer.
Connor Coskery:
We crumble.
Jeffrey Heine:
They're not attacking the logic of your faith, they're not looking for any evidence, they're not interested in any argument you might have. Now people mock one another when they, sit on their self appointed seat of superiority, which makes this really ironic because the serpent is subordinate to Eve, is subordinate to Adam, and yet he is mocking them. They should have known better. Eve responds in verse 3, when she says, 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. Now notice that Eve adds a restriction.
Jeffrey Heine:
It no longer is it you just can't eat from this fruit. You can't even touch it. You can't even touch it. Which shows she is already starting to think of God as being restrictive. That God is holding back on her.
Jeffrey Heine:
And this is something that we certainly have inherited from her. This this sense that God is is a little more restrictive than he actually has shown himself to be. We're prone towards legalism. We're prone towards that law. We want those boundaries.
Jeffrey Heine:
Well, the serpent, when she says that he sees his opening, and now he goes straight forward. Look at verse 4. Says, but the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, And so the serpent now, he doesn't, he's not subtle at all. He goes straight for an attack.
Jeffrey Heine:
He says, You're not gonna die. He attacks God's goodness. God lied to you. And now numerous scholars, they have commented on what the serpent does not attack. What he does not attack, he does not attack God's right as a creator to give commands that you should obey.
Jeffrey Heine:
They don't attack that. They don't attack Adam and Eve's faith in God, that He exists because they know He exists. They don't attack the fact that God really isn't whole, or he doesn't attack that God isn't really holy because they know that. They know these things. What Satan attacks is God's goodness.
Jeffrey Heine:
He's really not good. He's lying. He can't be trusted. Alan Ross, in his commentary says that, we find here Satan continually planting the seed that God is holding us back. He's holding us back.
Jeffrey Heine:
And we still believe that lie. Eve, God's lying to you. He's just he just doesn't want what is best for you. She bought it. We buy it.
Jeffrey Heine:
It's the reason we commit almost every sin. The enemy enemy was gonna tell us something, maybe, maybe about marriage. Say, I mean, you you really, you're gonna obey God? You're not some you you can only have sex with 1 woman, your wife, for all of life? Come on.
Jeffrey Heine:
He's holding you back. He's robbing you from joy. Don't let him do that. Or God wanting to you to give away your money. Give some to the poor.
Jeffrey Heine:
It's like, don't do that. You worked hard for that money. Hold on to it. Don't let God keep you down. Don't obey some archaic religion.
Jeffrey Heine:
And we still buy into it. We think God's holding us back. He really doesn't want us to be happy. He gives us all these rules that kind of restrain us. The reason we so often sin is because we believe the lie that we'll actually be more happy, more satisfied, more fulfilled if we actually disobey.
Jeffrey Heine:
We don't trust God's goodness. Look at verse 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. Look how fast we're talking about the fall of all of humanity. Look how fast it happens.
Jeffrey Heine:
She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband. Just like that. Just like that. Paradise, gone. Man's relationship with his creator and with one another, destroyed.
Jeffrey Heine:
Let's let's take a close look at what exactly this sin is that has doomed mankind. I mean, really eating from a tree isn't that bad. The sin here is that they wanted to be like God. That's the sin. Adam and Eve wanted to be like God.
Jeffrey Heine:
They wanted to turn to determine what was right and wrong. They wanted to be their own moral authority. They didn't want to let God be their moral authority. They did not want to acknowledge God as their creator with creator rights over them. They did not want anybody over them.
Jeffrey Heine:
They wanted to be a god unto themselves. And so being made in the image of God, which they were, was not enough. They didn't want to be made in the image of God. They wanted to actually become just like God. And once again, we haven't changed.
Jeffrey Heine:
Why do you get so angry at times when things don't work out just the way you planned? You get so angry it's not working out how I want it to. It's because you think you're God and you can control everything. And that things are supposed to happen this way because you declared it to happen this way. You wanna be like God.
Jeffrey Heine:
Let's look at what happens after they sin. Look at verse 7. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin cloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:
God among the trees of the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the very first thing that happened is that they knew they were naked. They knew it. And so, they tried to cover themselves in a pathetic attempt. They they sew up fig leaves, and they put it around them.
Jeffrey Heine:
They're trying to to cover their shame. They realize how they feel guilt, they feel shame, and and they've got to cover it in front of one another. God's not in the picture. They they they have to cover themselves not before God. They're gonna hide from God.
Jeffrey Heine:
They're covering themselves from one another. They feel shame when they stand in front of another human now. They feel exposed. And man's been doing this ever since. We don't actually use fig leaves, we use other things, but we we we always try to cover ourselves.
Jeffrey Heine:
The reason that a lot of you work so hard in your job to try to prove yourself, To try to just show everybody that you're something. Why do you do that? Fig leaves. You you wanna cover up who you really are, when you want people to think really highly of you. That's what you want.
Jeffrey Heine:
One of the reason that some of you got all A's in school and you couldn't stand to get a B, it would kill you, it would blow your self esteem wide because those good grades were fig leaves. They were covering you up, making you feel better. Parents, the reason that you want your kids to be perfect in front of other parents? It's fig leaves. Because you feel judged and you feel ashamed if people knew that my kids actually were just as terrible as your kids.
Jeffrey Heine:
It's a projection on me. And so you want them to be absolutely perfect. You don't want people to know who you really are and who your kids are like. No. I mean the reason some of you have a 1,000 friends on Facebook.
Jeffrey Heine:
I mean, a 1,000 Why? Woah. That person's got a 1,000 friends. Fig leaves, I am somebody. Ever since Adam and Eve first took that fruit, man has been terrified to be known by someone.
Jeffrey Heine:
We've been terrified of somebody knowing us. We feel the guilt, and so we put up barriers, we put up masks, we we put up fig leaves, we don't we don't want to really share our thoughts. I mean, there's a million blogs out there right now. Everybody who blogs is a liar. Everybody.
Jeffrey Heine:
They're not showing who they really are. Nobody wants to show who they really are. We haven't done that with our spouses. And we're in this incredible dilemma because I I think the humans have 2 basic needs. We wanna be known and we want to be loved.
Jeffrey Heine:
Which poses a huge problem because all of you know, if somebody really knows me, they won't love me. So I can't let them really know me if I want to be loved, and we see those two things as being completely opposed to one another. I could think of one time when when I was honest, when Lauren told me, like, tell me what's really on your mind. It's what you you you reminded me the other day. Lauren and I, when we were in college, we went to a Chinese restaurant.
Jeffrey Heine:
I had all day watched kung fu movies with my roommates all day in college, which is a bad thing to do. And my wife asked me, penny for your thoughts? And I said, no. And she goes, no, really? Penny for your thoughts?
Jeffrey Heine:
I said, no again. And she goes, tell me what you're thinking. And I said, I'm thinking I could get my finger, shove it through your eye, hook your hook your nose and slam it down on the table. And you asked. I would never do that.
Jeffrey Heine:
All I mean, if she hadn't asked, we would just say, hey, no nothing. I mean, watch a little basketball, something like that. That's what we do. Nope. We don't want people to know who we really are.
Jeffrey Heine:
All of you comfort my wife, she's an amazing woman. All of our relationships with others have been critically damaged by the fall. Critically damaged. We all cover ourselves. Let's look how god responds.
Jeffrey Heine:
Look at verse 8. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself. So now after covering themselves from one another, they have to hide from God.
Jeffrey Heine:
And here is the amazing thing, God comes looking for them. Not in judgment. He seeks them out. He calls and says, where are you? God knows where they are.
Jeffrey Heine:
He's God, He knows where they are. But he asks, where are you? And what he's doing is he's pursuing a relationship. He's trying to start a conversation with man. So Adam responds, well God I heard you in the garden and I was scared.
Jeffrey Heine:
I love what Martin Luther says about that. He says, but had not Adam heard god's voice before when God commanded him not to eat from the forbidden tree? Why was he not afraid then? But now he is terrified by the rustling of a leaf. Man became terrified of his creator.
Jeffrey Heine:
God responds by saying, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I told you not to eat from? Once again, god knows the answer. He's God. But what he's doing is he's actually becoming a counselor.
Jeffrey Heine:
He's counseling them. You know what any good counselor does is they just ask questions. They ask questions and they try to draw it out of people. Because the person confessing their sin is the first step of healing, and so God's trying to bring it out of them. Did you do this?
Jeffrey Heine:
Adam, did you do this? And Adam's response is so human. He passes the buck. Look at verse 12. The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.
Jeffrey Heine:
And so he he does confess but it's only after he says this, well well God, you gave me a woman, and that woman gave to me the fruit and I ate. I ate. But but I mean God really, it goes back to you. It goes back to you. You gave me the woman, she gave me the fruit, and so I ate.
Jeffrey Heine:
So God looks at the woman and says, what is this that you have done? You could actually translate that as, you did what? You did what? Do you have any idea what you just did? That's what you could put in your Bibles.
Jeffrey Heine:
Any idea. And so her first reaction to her sin is, now point fingers to the serpent. He deceived me, and and then I ate. And what you have to realize is anytime we are confronted with our sin, the first thing we want to do is cover up and never confess. That is our natural instinct.
Jeffrey Heine:
We wanna cover it up. We wanna pass the buck. We don't wanna confess, but God pushes. He pushes. Let's look at the result of their sin.
Jeffrey Heine:
Actually, you could say pretty much the world as we know it is the result of their sin, the world as we know it. They're kicked out of the garden, they're put in exile. You got this cherubim with this flaming sword flashing to and fro to keep them from coming back in. They no longer have all these fruit trees that they could pick freely from. Now they they have to go out into this cold hostile world and they have to work hard for the food.
Jeffrey Heine:
And it's not gonna be easy. Work which was initially designed to be a gift from the Lord. It was it was to be to the glory of God. It was to be enjoyable. Now is sweat, toil.
Jeffrey Heine:
It's a burden. Some of you feel that burden. Thorns, thistles cover the ground as all of creation now falls under this curse. Not just man, all of creation. And we too in this room fall under the curse.
Jeffrey Heine:
We inherited from our first parents their sin nature. And that's why we do the things we do. We're not naturally good. We're naturally inclined to do evil, just like our parents. The only good that we have is good that God has worked in us.
Jeffrey Heine:
Charles Spurgeon, he said that Adam did not break his little finger. Adam broke his neck. And all of his descendants received that same spiritual breaking death. And contrary to this being a great hindrance, some religions or psychiatrists, oh my gosh. Psychiatrists, thank you.
Jeffrey Heine:
Say, believing in a sin nature is actually the first step to healing. It is. It at least allows us to understand one another. Because now we understand, you know what? No government, no education, no amount of money is going to fix our problem.
Jeffrey Heine:
You can't, because it's a matter of the heart. We're broken. And it puts us all on the same same field. Nobody can exalt themselves above another because we're all depraved. Even though this text here is full of tragedy, we do see hope.
Jeffrey Heine:
God still initiates a relationship with man. Now look at verse 2021. Says, the man called his his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them. So God takes away their pathetic fig leaves and then he gives them clothes of animal skins.
Jeffrey Heine:
Now 2 very important things are happening here. For 1, God just killed an animal. He just made the first blood sacrifice to clothe them. He doesn't he he they've got to realize fig little fig leaves do does not atone for sin. It takes real life, it takes real blood if you want to be covered.
Jeffrey Heine:
And so he he meets their spiritual need immediately after they fall, and then he meets their physical need. They're now going into a harsh environment. They're leaving the garden. So right off the bat, God meets their their spiritual needs, and He clothes them, and He meets their physical needs. He's still pursuing them.
Jeffrey Heine:
He's still caring for them. But the greatest hope of this text is found in verse 15. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. This is said to the serpent. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.
Jeffrey Heine:
This is often being called by theologians, the protoevangel, the the first Gospels, the first hint of the gospel that we have. And it's here that we get our first little glimpse. It's fuzzy, it's a little blurry, but we get our first glimpse of Jesus, the Son of God who's gonna come. God speaks to the serpent and says there's gonna be war between your offspring and the woman's offspring, but but one day somebody's gonna come and you're gonna strike him, bite him in the heel, but he's gonna turn and he's gonna stomp you, give you a crushing blow in the head. To see what this means, we've got to fast forward 1000 of years from this story.
Jeffrey Heine:
We've got to study another garden, another tree. Actually, all the themes that we find here in this garden in Genesis 3 are found again towards In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was so burdened and he was sweating so profusely, it says that he sweat blood. There's also a tree, it's the cross. For Adam and Eve, the tree was a knowledge of good and evil, for Jesus it's the cross. And if Adam and Eve had obeyed God concerning the tree, they would not die.
Jeffrey Heine:
But if Jesus obeys God concerning the tree, what happens? Death, not life. For him obedience means suffering. It means separation. It means taking on the curse.
Jeffrey Heine:
On the cross we see thorns again. That's the symbol of the the curse of the entire world. But this time, what is it? It's beaten on his head. As he is lifting, as he is carrying the curse of this world on the cross.
Jeffrey Heine:
Genesis 3 15 speaks of Jesus. Jesus is the one who's struck in the heel by the serpent, and as that venom goes in, Jesus in his last act stomps before death, defeating our enemy. And now through this death, we have access. We have access to God. You know, our relationships been restored.
Jeffrey Heine:
The curse that was brought onto us has been broken. Jesus, once again, has opened up Eden to us by going under the sword. That sword that guarded Eden, well, Jesus is described in Isaiah as he was cut off from the living. Cut off. Interesting little tidbit, the, the gospel of Matthew.
Jeffrey Heine:
It describes when Jesus died, it says that the the temple veil, the curtain in the temple was ripped from top to bottom. We find in 2nd Chronicles 3, it describes that curtain, and it says that there was actually cherubim embroidered all in it because this was the it was the barrier to the presence of God. Just as the cherub with the flaming sword was the barrier to the presence of God. It was the barrier to paradise. The barrier to Eden.
Jeffrey Heine:
And when Jesus died, he went under the sword and the curtain was ripped. There is no longer a need to protect that holy place. We have free access. Absolutely free access. It's granted.
Jeffrey Heine:
So when we preach redemption at this church, that's what it means. The older relationship with one another is fundamentally destroyed. Our relationship with God has been fundamentally destroyed. We inherited that from Adam and Eve. God took on all of that on the cross.
Jeffrey Heine:
For him, obedience meant death. And now when we look at the cross, it is a tree of life to us. Pray with me. Lord, I ask that you would work deep within us your gospel, deep within us. Jesus, we say thank you.
Jeffrey Heine:
May our entire lives be lived in utter devotion to you. If we obeyed you, we would have received life. Jesus, you obeyed your father and received death, the death we deserved. Thank you. We pray this in your name.