God Gives Hope • Genesis 3

56:58 Teaching begins

Notes

When I thought about Christmas this year, I thought what’s so important about it?  I worked the meaning of Christmas backwards.

Well, it’s the birth of Jesus Christ into the world.

Who is Jesus Christ? Christ is the Greek translation of  the Hebrew word Messiah, the Anointed One foretold in Scripture through promises, covenants, and prophecies made over four thousand years.

Why did God make those promises? Because God gave hope that He was going to fix things that got messed up so badly.

What got messed up? The answer is, everything. Everything was perfect, and one man ruined everything.

That’s why we need hope.

I’m reading in Genesis 3.

1. At this point in which we start God has just created everything perfectly.

A. Genesis begins with God creating all existence as we know it in six days.

B. When God was finished everything was very good. The Bible says it was perfect, perfect between God and man, perfect between man and woman, and man and nature.

C. The only other explanation for our existence is a scientific philosophical beginning without God. Something happened that somehow results in complexity and life. It doesn’t explain anything. There is no purpose in what happened, it just happened.

D. The Bible begins with God and perfection and it was all very good. There’s everything there for full life. Nothing is missing. Especially, there is no sin, no death. There is no curse.

2. What happened is subtlety, deception, lies, and murder.

A. The serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. Skilful in achieving one’s ends through indirect, subtle, or underhanded ways.

B. He questions God’s goodness in an indirect way: “Did God really say you shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” There are a couple of inferences there.

1. Did God really say? The serpent is muddling up what God actually said.

2. The serpent questions the essential goodness of  God. You mean you live in that whole garden and you can’t eat of the trees? Why would God let you look but not eat? Doesn’t sound right to me.

C. Eve replies, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden except the tree in the middle of the garden. If we eat of it or touch it, we’ll die.

D. The serpent directly contradicts what God said. You surely shall not die! What God said is not true. God lied to you.

E. The serpent lies: God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. The serpent says what I’m telling you is the truth.

1. God is preventing you from being like Him. He knows something you don’t know because He hasn’t told you. He’s not honest with you. He’s holding back something good from you. He doesn’t want to share it with you.

2. He’s keeping you down by keeping this to Himself. But you can take it for yourself. You can make yourself like God. You don’t have to wait for Him, you can do it yourself.

3. Already something titanic has happened. Eve starts to think like the serpent. She sees according to the serpent.

A. She sees that the tree is good for food. Before she held it to be true that if she even touched that fruit she would die. Now she holds it to be true that it’s not different from the other trees. It’s the same as all the other trees. All the other trees are good for food, this is just the same, it’s good for food. It won’t take life, it gives life.

B. She sees that the fruit is pleasant to the eyes. It looks good. I bet it tastes good. Everything else looks good and tastes great. This probably does, too.

C. It’s desirable to make one wise. God is wise, this will make me wise like God. Why shouldn’t I be wise like God?

D. She takes of the fruit and eats it. And she offers it to her husband. Adam takes that fruit and eats it. He doesn’t want to be left out. He doesn’t want her to be more than him.

4. Reality crashes in. Adam and Eve die.

A. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.

1. They have an awful realisation. It’s not good. It’s not being like God. It’s being less than they were the previous minute. They have been degraded and exposed.

2. Up until then they were without clothing and didn’t think anything of it.

3. Now they are conscious of impropriety. Of being wrong. They aren’t covered. There is shame. There is guilt of having done something wrong.

B. They deal with their distress in a completely inadequate way.

1. We have to cover ourselves so that we are no longer naked, that’s an overwhelming need.

2. They make themselves coverings of fig leaves. it’s a covering of a kind.

3. They clothe the outward person, but the problem is not outward but inward. They are incapable to deal with guilt, the awareness of being wrong with God. Those fig leaves make no difference to God who sees their guilt.

4. Even as a covering fig leaves are worse than no covering at all. Once picked, fig leaves begin to shrink. Fig leaves cause itching when applied on bare skin.

5. It’s worse than it was before, and they have not covered their guilt before God.

C. While they experience shrinking, itchy leaves, they hear the sound of the Lord God coming in the cool of the day in the garden.

1. Just yesterday this would be a glorious, wonderful time, after a day of fullness and perfection, here comes God Himself to make the end of the day even better than when it started. In His presence is fullness of joy.

2. Except today, right now, they are guilty, completely unfit to be in God’s presence. They don’t hear the sound of their maker, their Father coming. They hear Doom approaching, like T-Rex in Jurassic Park. We’re dead, we’re dead! What do we do?

3. So they jump into the bushes to hide from God. Again, this is inadequate to deal with their situation. They are trying to hide from God. They are running away from God in fear of death.

D. Even as they still exist, they are dead in their sin. The perfect relationship with God is gone. They are separated from God because they chose to do what they wanted to do, not what God wanted. They are dead in their sin and they can’t fix it.

5. This single sin against God brings Adam and Eve from the distant past into the modern era. Everything they do is quite modern.

A. God asks Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” Adam says, “The woman whom You gave to me, she gave to me, and I ate.” Adam uses a modern tactic we all use: he shifts blame away from himself to Eve, and to God. If You hadn’t given her to me, she wouldn’t have given to me. It’s Your fault and her fault.”

B. God asks Eve, “What is this you have done?” Adam’s just blown up his relationship with his wife. She is alone in her misery; she has no one to turn to. This is modern. When the ship sinks it’s every man for himself. All she can do is blame the serpent.

C. It’s modern for men and women to be totally disconnected from God and to have fragile, undependable relationships with each other.

6. God judges them because He is God.

A. “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle, more than all the beasts of the field.

1. We know from reading later in the Bible this is not just a serpent, he is the highest of all created angelic beings. He was called Morningstar, Hebrew Lucifer, the anointed cherub, or living being, who covers, who was in the very presence of God. He is beautiful and exalted with glory because that’s how God made him to be.

2. Yet God says you are cursed more than the beasts. It doesn’t mean all beasts are cursed, it means you are cursed to the nth degree. Beasts are below humans. I wonder if one-celled animals are included? You were the highest, the most beautiful, now you are under the lowest. You have fallen and there is no remedy for you. You’re going to crawl forever.

3. You’re not going to endure. The seed of the woman will crush your head. You’re greater, you’re higher, but a human being will crush your head.

B. God says to the woman, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Greatly multiply your sorrow on many levels. Childbirth is going to be painful. Motherhood will be painful. Marriage will be painful. That’s the modern experience.

C. What happens to Adam is going to happen to everyone. This is also a modern experience.

1. Cursed is the ground for your sake. Before you sinned everything grew easily and plentifully. Now you’re going to have to work hard until you’re exhausted. You have to work whether you like it or not, or you starve. You’re on your own.

2. Weeds will grow without cultivation. They’re stronger than cultivated crops.

3. You have to work to maintain your work. If you do nothing everything you’ve worked for will disappear under weeds. A little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will overtake you like a robber.

4. Paul refers to this in Romans 8:20-21 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

5. If you want to get technical, this is also known as the second law of thermodynamics: everything is running down to the point of entropy: the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. I read this quote in the dictionary: Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder. Adam’s sin caused the universe to begin dying.

6. Everyone goes back to the dust. When you’re cremated that’s fast oxidation. Decomposition in the ground is slow oxidation. But it’s all oxidation, it all goes back to dust. Your only choice is go fast or slow.

7. In the midst of the horrible mess God brings hope.

A. It’s so small you might miss it in the midst of death for the whole universe. It just got started and it’s already dying. It’s ruined.

B. God is the God of hope. He does three things that give hope, the expectation of good.

C. One thing God does is give a word of promise.

1. The seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s head. The serpent will crush the seed’s heel, but he will crush the serpent’s head. Heel is bad, head is more severe. The serpent will get the worst of it in the end.

2. This seed of the woman is a human being. By a man came sin. So the hope, the expectation of good, is that the serpent’s head will be crushed by a man.

3. But there’s something highly irregular about this phrase, “the seed of the woman”. Women do not have seed. The man has the seed. Women have the ovum. The ovum is incomplete until it fuses with seed from the male. We have here a riddle, an impossibility.

4. The word of God promises an impossibility will happen so that the serpent’s head will be crushed. That’s all we know so far.

B. But there’s another sign of hope. God clothes Adam and Eve with skins.

1. This is God’s clothing, and it satisfies God. It’s not Adam’s attempt that is insufficient. It’s not fig leaves from a plant, these are skins from an animal that was alive and is now dead.

2. Instead of Adam and Eve dying, an innocent, perfect substitute dies. The death of the substitute clothes Adam and Eve adequately, so that they can be accepted in the presence of God.

3. Adam didn’t think this up, God did, and in His eyes this is adequate. This brings hope. God will provide a substitute.

C. Here’s the third sign of hope: a cherub guards the way to the tree of life. That doesn’t sound hopeful but stick with me.

1. If Adam ate of that tree in his sinful state he would be separate from God forever under the curse of futility and entropy, energy death. God Himself says that could happen.

2. God takes care that Adam is not going to live forever separated from God. He is going to live a long time, but it’s still a temporary life. That means he can change. God is leaving the provision for Adam to change.

3. That way is guarded to keep the way back to God open and not let it be closed forever. That’s a mercy. We are changeable. We live in this temporary environment and God can change us and He will change us so that we don’t die, but we live.

7. So what?

A. The sin of Adam is not a small problem, this is THE problem.

1. This affects us personally; we die because Adam sinned. Our existence until we die is messed up. Our relationship with God is destroyed. We experience running away from God, not wanting anything to do with God. Our relationship with others are messed up. We betray and gaslight one another. There’s disease and tragedy. It’s still every man for himself. Do that on a national scale and you have the world’s governments falling apart and going back to dust.

2. This affects our environment, the universe; it affects everything you own. Everything you own is falling apart. Fix it all you want, it’s still falling apart.

B. This isn’t a “just-so” explanation for how things are. This is the only explanation.

1. The philosophy of science says entropy and decay is just how things are. That’s observable, it’s scientific, but it doesn’t explain why that should be or why it’s not natural. It has nothing to say about death. It has no solutions except to say one day we’ll get it and then we won’t be subject to disease and death. We’ll get ourselves integrated with chips and elevate ourselves to a new position of being superhuman where we don’t have to physically die.

2. Men say, it’s bad but we can fix it. We’re going to fix global warming. It’s right up there with “Let’s get some fig leaves and cover ourselves. That ought to work.” The problem is beyond human repair. People are simply inadequate. Men are not going to solve the problem of sin against God and guilt and death.

C. We need God to do what is for us impossible, so that our guilt and nakedness are truly covered, so that we can come back to God who is our life. When that impossible thing happens, everything and everyone on earth and in heaven, will, and must change for good.

D. That impossible thing is Christmas. This seed of the woman, crushing the head of the serpent, clothing naked people, brings them back to God, and is the only hope of the world.

E. We’re going to look at the paper trail of promises of God and prophecy that shows Jesus coming into the world is the turning point in all human existence. Christmas isn’t just a good festival. It’s the only hope there is in the world.

Let’s pray.