THE ROYAL - WARRIORS Part 1: 06.06.10

Genre - Narrative: Read it like a novel. How to live like Christ.

6 Biblical Narrative Observations
1. Narratives are stories of God’s attempt to redeem mankind to a right relationship with Himself.
2. Narratives involve real people, places and times.
3. Narratives are stories about how God uses imperfect people who trust Him to accomplish extraordinary things by trusting Him.
4. Narratives explain what did happen but not necessarily what should happen or will happen to you.
5. Narratives don’t teach, but illustrate doctrine and theological concepts.
6. Narratives illustrate how to be more like Jesus.

Narrative Reading Rules: Identify the Characters, Plot, Plot Resolution and Dialogue
Characters:
• God’s friends: Vessels who are attempting to build God’s kingdom.
• Satan’s friends: Tools of Satan who oppose God’s friends.
(People, Angels, Demons, Animals, Perceptions)
• Satan – God’s enemy
• God – The hero
 

Drama:
• Plot: How are God’s friends attempting to build God’s kingdom and in what way are Satan’s friends resisting them?
• Plot Resolution: How does God, the hero, resolve the conflict between His friends and Satan’s friends?
 

Dialogue: The drama is developed with words and actions. Characters develop and grow
throughout the story.

READ: Genesis 3:1 - 11

Read, pray and discover what God communicated to the people then.

Background:
  Setting: Place – Garden of Eden Time – Creation
  Author: Moses (Numbers 11:33 God spoke to Moses face to face)
  Audience: Israel

Narrative Reading Rules:
  Characters: God, Satan, God’s friend: Adam , Satan’s friend: Eve
  Drama: The Plot – Mankind called to bear God’s image on earth and Satan is determined to destroy that      image. Plot Resolution – God punishes man and Satan and promises a savoir, sets in motion a plan to bring the savoir into the world and restore things back to their right relationship with Him.
  Dialogue: Conversations between God, Satan and Adam and Eve.
  Discovery: What is the message intended by the author to the original audience?
Answer: There is an incredible spiritual battle between God and Satan and man is in the middle.

Reflect, pray and determine what is God communicating to us now.

All humanity is sinful and doomed to punishment, but God has provided salvation .

GENESIS 3:1 - 6

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made (Genesis 3:1a).

Let us move on to consider the strategy that the Tempter employs. This is most instructive because it is exactly the strategy he employs when he appears as an angel of light to us—not that we shall see visions of shining beings—but the personality that he exemplifies, the character in which he appears, is the same now as then. He is an angel of light. Scripture makes clear that the devil can also appear as a roaring lion, meaning he can strike in tragedy, in sickness, or in physical evil, as he struck Job or Paul, with his thorn in the flesh, which Paul called the messenger of Satan. When he appears as a lion, he can strike fear into our hearts. But his most effective strategy is to appear as someone good, someone attractive, something or someone who appeals to us as an angel of light.

If you learn how to recognize the strategy of the devil, you will find that he invariably employs the same tactics. There is a sense in which he is very limited, and he doesn't vary his tactics widely. Sometimes we feel as if we shall never learn how to anticipate the devil. But we can learn. Paul said that he was not ignorant of the devil's devices (2 Corinthians 2:11). If we learn how he works, we can easily learn to detect him in our lives.

James has described this strategy very plainly in one or two verses. He says, ...each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (James 1:14-15).

There is the strategy of the devil. He always approaches us in the same three stages, and those steps are outlined clearly in this text. His first tactic is to arouse desire. James says that every man is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed (James 1:14). Each step the devil takes with us is always to arouse desire to do wrong, to create a hunger, a lure, or enticement toward evil.

The second is to permit intent to form an act to occur. James describes this: after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin (James 1:15). Notice that the symbol he employs is that of conception and birth. There is a gestation period in temptation, for once desire is aroused, there occurs a process within which sooner or later issues in sin, an act that is wrong.

The third stage is that the devil immediately acts upon the opportunity afforded by the evil act to move in and to produce results that Scripture describes as death—sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. This is the devil's ultimate aim. Jesus said that he was a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). He delights in mangling, smashing, twisting, destroying, blighting, and blasting. We can see his activity present everywhere; it is going on around us, in our own lives and in the lives of others. These are the works of the devil, says the Scripture (1 John 3:8).

Lord, thank You for this reminder that I have an enemy, and I am in a battle. Teach me to see through the strategies of Satan and to stand firm against his attacks.

GENESIS 3:7-13

Our task in this series of Genesis studies is to find clues to the greatest mystery novel that has ever been written -- the story of man. We are seeking to understand ourselves, both as men and women "in Adam," and also as the new men and women we have become if we are "in Christ." But we must begin with the first Adam because what he was we are. As one German writer put it, "I am delving into Adam in order to unriddle him, and myself."

In this series on Understanding Man, we have come to the last of the three stages of temptation. We have been watching the Tempter, as the Shining One, dealing with Eve in the Garden of Eden, and later, through her, reaching Adam as well:

We have already noted that the first thing he does is to light a flame of desire within her for what God has forbidden. This is the first step of temptation; it is yet today. No matter how many thousands of years have rolled by since this account in the garden took place, it is still repeating itself in this 20th century hour.

Then we noticed, in Stage 2, that when the mind was engaged, as ultimately it must be, it did not rationally consider the facts but it rationalized the desire. It made the doing of wrong look profitable, pleasurable, and even necessary to human fulfillment. How familiar we are with this process! How easily we rationalize what we want to do and make it look reasonable, and even necessary. If you question that, listen to your own excuses, the reasons why you do things: You can't help it; Your whole family does it; Your ancestry demands it: You are Irish, or Latin, or something similar.

Thus the evil act was finally accomplished in the Garden of Eden. We read "she took of its fruit and ate: and she gave to her husband and he ate," (Genesis 3:6b RSV). When desire, conceived and rationalized, issues at last in ultimate form, it becomes an act or a settled attitude of the heart.

Now we come to Stage 3 in the process of temptation, which the Apostle James tells us is: "sin, when it is finished, brings forth death," (James 1:15b KJV).

Remember that God had said to Adam and Eve in the very beginning, concerning the forbidden fruit, "in the day that you eat of it, you will die," (Genesis 2:17b). But the Tempter had said to Eve. "You will not die," (Genesis 3:4b RSV). He openly and defiantly challenged God's pronouncement. He said, "your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God," (Genesis 3:4b RSV). The way he said it made it sound like something glorious, exciting, and adventurous. He was saying to them, by implication, "When you eat of this fruit you need no longer depend on this old Lord of creation: you will be lords in your own right. You can make decisions like God does, and do what you want to do." This has been the subtle lie that has hung over the whole human race from that day to this. But now the deed has been done, and we come now to the moment of truth.

Which view is right? Will they die? Is the Devil right? The answer is given in 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 aprons. (Genesis 3:7 RSV)

At first it is the Devil who seems to be right. He said they would not die, and when they took of the fruit they did not drop down dead. He said their eyes would be opened and it is true that new knowledge was immediately granted to them. They saw things they had not seen before. Does that mean then that the Devil was right? No, because from the moment they ate they began to die -- exactly as God had said: "In the day that you eat of it you will die," (Genesis 2:17). Romans 5:12 says, "As sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, so death passed upon all men..." This was the moment at which that occurred.

In this present passage we shall discover what we might call the signs of death. Death is not simply the moment when the breath leaves your body and you become a corpse. That is not death in its totality: that is simply the end of death. It is the end of a process which has been going on for some time, the beginning of which was so subtle that perhaps you did not even recognize it. It is this beginning of death which is traced in this Genesis account. The proof that this story of the Fall really occurred is found in the four things which this account reveals as marking the beginning of death. They are found in every person in this room, without exception, and every person in the world, without exception. These things are present in the whole race. We all know that when we yield to temptation we experience pleasure. We enjoy the pleasures of sin. But what this account forces us to face is that with the pleasure comes an undesirable accompaniment, a fall-out of sin, which we cannot escape. It is all a package deal. If we choose to take that momentary pleasure, we cannot choose to evade the accompaniment that comes -- death. Here is spelled out for us the four things which mark the beginning of death.

The first one is this, "they knew that they were naked." Now they were naked all along. God did not make Adam and Eve with clothes on, any more than he makes human beings with clothes on today. We come into this world naked. They too came into the world naked, but they did not know they were naked until the Fall. Why not? Because they had never looked at themselves -- their interest was not in this direction. They were self-less. Before the Fall they were concerned about the animals, for Adam had the task of naming all the animals. They were concerned about the garden, and about the work that had been assigned to them. They were concerned with each other, one about the other. But now suddenly they saw themselves. This awareness of self-nakedness is a symbolic way of expressing the fact that this was the birth of what we callself-consciousness. They saw themselves and the immediate effect was to bring shame and embarrassment upon them.

I would like to submit this to you for the testing ground of your own life. Is this not your most serious trouble; this fact that you are conscious of yourself? Is this not where you struggle the most? We all know that when, for a moment or two, we can forget ourselves, we do fine. We can speak, we can act, we can do many things well -- if we can forget ourselves. But then the sense of self comes flooding back over us; we remember ourselves, and we begin to fumble, to stammer, to blush; suddenly we are all thumbs and left feet. Why? This is the effect of self-consciousness. But God did not make man that way. Man was never made to be conscious of himself. His interests were to lie outside himself, he was to be self-less.

This accompaniment of self-consciousness dogs every one of us every day, and the amazing thing is that, to this very day, we discover that clothing helps us. Adam and Eve, when they discovered they were naked, immediately made rough clothing out of fig leaves. They made themselves aprons and covered themselves. Here is the explanation for the fact that the whole human race finds it psychologically necessary to clothe themselves. In mankind's fellowship and intercourse with one another, clothing helps. It helps to make us feel more secure, more adequate, more able to face life.

This is why women, when they get blue or discouraged, find it very uplifting to buy a new dress. One lady said, "Whenever I get down in the dumps I get a new hat." And her husband said, "I wondered where you got them."

So, like Adam and Eve, we reflect the same thing; we find ourselves making clothes to cover our self-consciousness.

We find this true at the psychological level as well. This is what lies behind the universal practice of creating an impression, projecting an image of ourselves. That is a form of psychological clothing. Physically, clothing is a way of changing our appearance so that we look different than we actually are. So it is with the matter of projecting an image. It is a way of trying to get people to think of us as different than we really are. This is why, at one time or another, we all find ourselves struggling with the matter of being honest, of being open. We find it difficult to be so. We do not want people to see us, or think of us, as we are. That is why we avoid too close contact with one another. We do not want to spend much time with any one person because we are afraid he will see us as we are. You can see how this idea simply permeates the race, and has ever since the moment self-consciousness was born in an act of disobedience.

The second thing this account shows us, present among us because of the disobedience of man, is found in 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 God among the trees of the garden. (Genesis 3:8 RSV)

Hiding is an instinctive reaction to guilt, and reveals the fact of guilt. When one of my daughters was a baby she had the habit of sucking her thumb. It carried over into late babyhood and we tried to help her with this. She began to feel very guilty about sucking her thumb and we often found that, when we would catch her doing so, she would take it out of her mouth and hide it under her dress. Now, who taught her to do that? No one. No one needs to teach us such things; these are instinctive reactions. She hid because she felt guilty.

Thus here in Verse 8 is the first description of a human conscience beginning to function; that inner torment we are all familiar with which cannot be turned off, no matter how hard we try. In fact, often the harder we try to ignore it, the deeper it pierces and the more obdurate it becomes. Psychologists agree that guilt is a universal reaction to life, that, without apparent reason or explanation, all of us, without exception, suffer from guilt. This sense of guilt haunts us, follows us, makes us afraid. We are afraid of the unknown, of the future, of the unseen, just as Adam and Eve discovered themselves to be.

But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked: and I hid myself." (Genesis 3:9-10 RSV)

That is the heritage of the Fall, this sense of guilt. It is death at work in human life. But there is still a third aspect of this death revealed here:

He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest 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?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate." (Genesis 3:11-13 RSV)

There is much in these verses which we will pass by for the moment, to return to in our next message, but I want to focus now on the first playing of the oldest game in the world, the favorite indoor sport of the whole race -- passing the buck. The Lord said to them, "What is this that you have done?" And Adam said, "Well, the woman that you gave to me, she gave me the fruit, and I ate. It's her fault." The woman said, "Well, it's not my fault, it's the serpent's fault. The serpent beguiled me, and I ate."

This is the first human attempt to deal with the problem of guilt. Interestingly enough, it is exactly the same way by which we 20th century people also try to relieve guilt. See how these factors are all related. It is self-consciousness which is the basic, fundamental wrongness about human life. That is what produces guilt. Our awareness of self makes us ashamed, embarrassed, and guilty. Then in order to evade this sense of guilt, we do what Adam did. We say, "Well, it's not my fault. I'm but a victim of circumstance." He took it like a man -- he blamed it on his wife. And she passed it along to the serpent. But behind both excuses is the unspoken suggestion, very clear in this account, that it is really God's fault. "The woman whom Thou gavest me," says Adam. If you had never given me this woman I would never have fallen into this sin. The woman immediately passes it on and says, "It is because you allowed the serpent to come into this garden, that's the trouble." Both are pointing the finger ultimately at God and saying, "It's all your fault."

This is where blame always comes. Ultimately it points the finger at God and says he is at fault. Men are simply helpless victims of circumstance. This is what lies behind our urge to blame each other and pin the blame for our actions or attitudes upon some outward circumstance. When my children were little, one of them was engaged in a fight with her cousin. I said to them, "Who started this?" And the boy said, "She did! She hit me back!"

That attitude pervades the whole of society, and the whole of history. It is what I find married couples saying to one another all the time. The predominant problem in solving the tangles of a marriage relationship is to get the two to stop blaming each other. That is the hardest thing to do. But if they do it, the battle is two-thirds won. This is what races are doing today, and is the primary cause of racial strife. Each race is pointing a finger at the other and saying, "It's your fault!" This is what nations are doing in the international scene. We find ourselves universally yielding to this tendency to blame another, and, thus, ultimately, to blame God. Of course, we do not say that. Very seldom do you find a man coming out openly, out rightly, and blatantly saying it is God's fault. But that is what lies beneath the surface; we are blaming God for the whole thing, trying to turn guilt into fate and to make of ourselves mere innocent victims, suffering from a breakdown in creation for which God is responsible.

The fourth result which this account reveals is found in Verses 16 and 19:

To the woman he said,
   "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing;
      in pain you shall bring forth children, " (Genesis 3:16a RSV)

To Adam he said, Verse 19:

   "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
   till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken;
   you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Genesis 3:19 RSV)

Pain, sweat, and death. There are the limits of life. These are the prison walls that hem us in, and mock all our hunger and yearning after freedom and fullness. Is it not clear that the whole race suffers from a sense of loss, a sense of limitation? Each one of us, individually, knows this feeling. We know there is more to life than we are experiencing -- and how we crave it. How we long to find it, somehow, some way. We pore over travel folders. We read about new opportunities for work. We join a club, or seek a new relationship with other people. We adopt a hobby. We try desperately to find some way to enter into the fullness which we feel life ought to present to us. We know it is there, but we have lost the way to it. You can hear this panting after life in the present-day revolt of youth.

They are fed up with the materialistic hollowness of the previous generation. They know that happiness, obviously, does not lie in things -- in television sets and freezers and new cars. But they do not know where it is found. Every effort we make, every step we take, every channel we follow to find it, we are flung back constantly by these three things -- pain, hard, grinding toil, and the black wall of death.

Why is it that we all have a sense of needing to hasten at our work? Why are we forever saying, "Let's make the years count, let's use time to the full?" Why do we use calendars and clocks? It is because we realize that we must die. Our time is limited. We have only so much time and we must use it to the full. We are set around by walls we cannot break through. Every effort we make, if pressed too far, results in pain and struggle and death. That is what happened when the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened. They were indeed opened, but this is what they saw. They learned the hard, cruel facts of life lived apart from dependence upon God. They immediately knew that from which we all suffer: a sense of self-consciousness, an awareness of guilt, an urge to blame another, and that terrible, empty, hollow feeling of limitation, a sense of loss. What a cruel and dreary world these factors have produced. They are what the Bible calls "the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8), works which he is free to accomplish because man has given him opportunity in the disobedient act of his heart.

Well, we cannot leave the story there. We must remember that, if there was a first Adam from whose misdeed we all suffer this morning, the good news is that there is also a second Adam, a Man who came to reverse the works of the devil -- to free us, to loose us from their evil control. We cannot close this study without asking ourselves: What does Jesus Christ do about these things? I only wish we could take the time to open this meeting up for testimony so that you, yourselves, could say what he does. But yet I know I speak for the majority in this room when I review these things.

What does Jesus Christ do about my self-consciousness? What does he do about this sense that I must depend upon myself? How does he change the accompanying guilt, embarrassment, and sense of inadequacy that immediately floods me when I realize that I must reckon on myself to meet the demands of life, but I do not have what it takes? What does he do? He turns my eyes from myself to himself. I learn to say, as Paul learned to say, "I am crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I but him. He lives in me and what I do, I do not do out of dependence on myself: it is he at work in me and he is the adequate One," (Galatians 2:20). Immediately that I believe and act upon that, I lose myself-consciousness. I become self-less. There is manifest in my life the outgoing givingness of the self-less Christ. Any moment I am doing that, that will be the nature of the life I live. That will the nature of the life that you live in Christ. He completely destroys that tormenting self-consciousness which creates the embarrassment of life.

Well then, what does he do about my guilt? Ah, here is a glorious word! He comes to me when I stumble, when I fail or falter, when I find myself doing what I don't want to do and I loathe myself because of it, and he says to me. "If any man be in Christ there is no condemnation. You don't need to worry, I know that you will do these things. I know that you have given way, and that you will give way; I know this. I know that you don't easily choose good and repudiate evil. I know that, but I love you, and I accept you. If you will look at this wrong thing and simply regard it honestly, as it is, immediately there is no condemnation. You are as loved as you ever were, you are as much mine as you ever were. Don't look back at the past, start right here, now, and let's go on."

What does he do about my urge to blame another person? He helps me greatly at that point. Jesus says to me, "I will give you the formula by which you can work out the problems of your life with other people. First, remove the beam that is in your own eye, then you'll see clearly how to help the other." When I find that in my relationships with another I do not know how to help him, that I know what he is doing wrong but I don't know how to help him stop it, then I know that I am failing to remove first the beam that is in my own eye, I'm not following Jesus' directions. But if I will, if I sit down and say, "What is it I am doing that makes him (or her) act that way to me, what is it I am doing?" then the situation wonderfully changes and I find that everyone begins to act differently to me, the whole world is different. The problem did not lie with others, it lay with me. This is what Jesus helps me see. Openly, honestly, forthrightly, he tells me where the problem is.

What does he do about my fear of pain and sweat and death? Oh, so many of you could answer that, if you had the opportunity. You know what he does. He does not remove you from these things. In fact, you will often times find yourself more frequently in them than perhaps you would have otherwise. The pain is still here, the need for toil, for hard, grinding labor is still there. I know -- and you know -- that there will come a time when we must face the fact of death. I won't be here always. I cannot stand in this pulpit forever. I cannot carry on my work forever. I, too, must come the place where I fold my hands and my spirit leaves this body and I am dead. What does Jesus do about this?

In each circumstance he goes with me into it, and I discover that that which was to me a grievous cross where something within me is put to death and which I fear, becomes a doorway into a new and greater experience than I could ever have dreamed. It is the old story of the cross and the resurrection. You never can experience the glory of a resurrection unless you have first experienced the death of a cross. Pain is transmuted into something different, a quiet peace which, though the pain is still there, makes it all worthwhile. Then, like you, I look back on the painful experiences of my life and say, "Those were the hours when I learned my greatest lessons. Those were the times when God spoke to me as at no other time -- thank God for them." Then I can look at the demands of life for labor, sweat, and toil, and know that those are the moments, too, when I find myself the happiest, engaged in that which produces a great sense of gladness, peace and joy. And, at last, when I cross the river of death, it is but an incident. I know it will be so. It is but an incident, a momentary flash, and then all the greatness of God's glorious promise will begin to unfold in its shining actuality. "O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Corinthians 15:55).

That is why Jesus Christ came. He finds us as people, human beings, involved in the nitty-gritty, hurly-burly of life, the struggle, the heartache, the grief, the sweat, blood, and tears of life, and he transmutes those things into patience and peace and joy. Christianity is not something to be experienced only in a religious service on Sunday -- that's merely the whipped cream on top -- but the wonderful body of it is mingled with the flow and flood of life itself. That is what makes it all so glorious. Jesus reverses the devil's activity; he releases us from the works of the devil.

What happens when, as Christians, we choose wrong? Well, we experience death. This is inevitable. "The mind of the flesh is death," says the Apostle Paul (see Romans 8:6). If we deliberately choose to disobey our Lord we will experience the four-fold death that follows inevitably in the great package deal of life. It is the law of inevitable consequences which Paul describes so clearly when he says, "Whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap," (Galatians 6:7 KJV). But the glory of the gospel is that the other side is true, as well. "If you sow to the Spirit, you will of the Spirit reap life" (Galatians 6:8b) -- and life as you have never known it before. If you sow to the Spirit; if you obey and walk in fellowship with the Son of God, then in this life there comes the sure reversing of all these evil things we have been looking at and in its place will be the fellowship, the joy, the glory, and the riches which are in Jesus Christ. I find myself struggling to put this in adequate terms. I do not rightly know how to say it -- I only know that it is gloriously true.

May God help us to cease our disobedience, to stop challenging the authority of the Word of God, to cease our apathetic lethargy that refuses to venture on the facts that Jesus Christ reveals to us.

Prayer:

Father, help us to understand ourselves and to understand how clearly and relevantly these things speak to our lives and our situation. Grant to us, Lord, the courage to begin right where we are -- now. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Life Application: The devil delights in the fallacies we have about him. Have we learned to recognize the strategies of Satan and the repetitive three stages he uses to approach us?

GENESIS 3:8-21

It always strikes me as strange that anyone can deny the reality of the story of the Fall of man, especially when the very man who denies it is himself repeating it, perhaps dozens of times a day. As we have discovered already, temptation follows the same pattern with us that it did with Eve in the Garden of Eden. Always there is first the arousing of desire; then the mind, seizing upon that desire, rationalizes it to make it seem reasonable, proper, and profitable. Then the will acts -- and immediately confusion, guilt, blame, and a sense of limitation follow without fail. The process is absolutely relentless. We may think that we have hidden this from the eyes of man, and oftentimes many of us are deluded into thinking that because no human being knows about our guilt, nothing has happened. Yet within us, whenever we yield to evil, a darkness falls and death tightens its grip upon our throat.

We come now to the same passage we looked at last time together, but to look this time not at man but at God. For centuries there has been a dirty lie about God making the rounds which suggests that at the Fall of man God ruthlessly lowered the boom on guilty Adam and Eve, that he gave them no chance to explain but simply tracked them down, sternly rebuked them (my children would say he yelled at them), began cursing everything around in blazing anger and ended by booting Adam and Eve out of the garden and slamming and locking the door behind them. Nothing could be further from the truth! We must trace very carefully now the actions of God in this account because, of course, this is the same way God will treat us in the many times we fall in temptation.

God begins his dealings with man with three questions which will occupy us today. The first one is found in Verses 8 and 9:

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?" (Genesis 3:8-9 RSV)

It is most striking to me that all religions, apart from Christianity, begin on the note of man seeking after God. Only the Bible starts with the view of God seeking after man. That highlights an essential difference between our Christian faith and the other great religions of the world. Furthermore, this first question here in the Old Testament is matched by the first question asked in the New Testament. Here it is God asking man, "Where are you?" and in the New Testament, in Matthew, the first question that appears is that of certain wise men who come asking, "Where is he?" (Matthew 2:2).

If we take this account in the garden literally (as I believe we must), then it is clear that God habitually appeared to Adam in some visible form, for now Adam and Eve in their guilt and awareness of nakedness hide from God when they hear the sound of his footsteps in the garden. This indicates a customary action on God's part. He came in the cool of the day, not because that was more pleasant for him but because it was more pleasant for man, and he habitually held some form of communication with man. We know from the rest of Scripture that whenever God appears visibly in some manifestation it is always the second Person of the Godhead, the Son, who thus appears. If that be true then we have here what is called a theophany, i.e., a visible manifestation of God before the incarnation. Thus the One here who asks of Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" is the same One of whom later men would ask, "Where is he who was born King of Jews?" (Matthew 2:2).

Notice the importance of this question, Where are you? When a man is lost this is the most important question he can ask: Where am I? Suppose this morning the telephone rang here and you answered it to hear a voice ask, "Is this the Peninsula Bible Church?" You say, "Yes," and the person on the other end of the line says, "I'd like to come to your church this morning. I thought I knew the way, but I find myself very confused. Can you help me?" What is the first question you would ask? "Where are you?" That is always first. "Where are you?"

Today we are seeking to find a way out of a very confusing situation that prevails in our world. We will never do it until we start with this question which God first asked man, "Where are you?" Where am I? Perhaps the reason many are unable to be helped today is either because they cannot or will not answer that question. Ask it of yourself now. Where are you? In the course of your life, from birth to death, moving as you hope you are moving, to develop stability of character, trustworthiness, integrity of being, all these qualities which we admire in others and want in ourselves -- where are you? How far have you come? Until you can answer that, in some sense at least, there is no possibility of helping you. What do you say?

Perhaps many of you will have to say, "I don't know where I am. I don't know. I only know that I am not where I ought to be, nor where I want to be. That's all I can say." If that is all you can say that is at least an honest answer, and, therefore, it is the most helpful answer you can give, and, in that sense, is the only right answer. "I don't know, I only know that I'm not where I ought to be."

God's second question to man is even more significant:

And he[Adam] said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself." He[God] said, "Who told you that you were naked?" (Genesis 3:10-11a RSV)

Let us be sure we read that question rightly. God is not asking Adam, "Look, who let the cat out of the bag about this? What rascal has been telling you tales out of school? Has the CIA been here, too?" He does not ask, "Who told you that you were naked, in the sense of, 'What person has come in to inform you of this?'" No, this is a rhetorical question. God does not expect a direct answer, but it is a question designed to make Adam think.

Who did tell him? That is, "How do you know this? You say you're naked; you didn't know that before. How do you know this? From what source has this knowledge come? Something has happened, a change has occurred; where did your knowledge come from?" The answer, of course, is: "No one told him." Well then, how did he know? Something within told him this. It did not come from without at all, it came from within. A change had occurred within him, and, instinctively, he senses that change and knows something that he did not know before. An evil knowledge has come to man, just as God said it would. The tree of which he partook was the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil," and, by partaking, man gained immediately an evil knowledge. From where did it come? From within. This is what God wants Adam to see.

In order to sense the full significance of this we must link it with the first question. That was, you remember, "Where are you?" and it had but one proper answer, "I'm not where I want to be. I'm lost, hopelessly lost, hidden. I don't know where I am." Well, why don't you? Why is it that we have such difficulty pinpointing ourselves in our progress and relationship to the world around us? Why? It is because of something within, isn't it? Remember that Jesus said, "It is not that which enters a man which defiles him, but that which comes from within," (Matthew 15:11). "For from within," he says, "out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts, fornication, murder, adultery, covetousness, licentiousness, pride, foolishness, all these evil things come from within and defile a man," (Matthew 15:18-19).

It is what I am within which makes me ashamed and guilty, and sends me scrambling for fig leaves to cover myself up. I have often wondered what would happen if we had at the entrance to the church every Sunday morning a television camera able to read people's thoughts without their knowing it, as they came in the door. What if every one of us, passing by, had our thoughts recorded and then we announced that next Sunday morning we would play them on a screen up front? How many would be here to see the show?

Someone has said, "If the best of men had his innermost thoughts written on his forehead, he'd never take his hat off." We know this is true. It is that which is within which defiles us. Something has happened within. The basic fundamental issue of humanity is not what is happening outside, but what is happening inside, within.

Now God moves to his third question, and it is in two parts, one addressed to the man and one to the woman.

"Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest 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?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate." (Genesis 3:11b-13 RSV)

There is something very interesting here. God asks both the same question, essentially. He is saying to each, "Tell me, what is it that you did? Specifically, definitely, clearly; what is it that you did?" But there is an exquisite touch of delicacy and grace here, which I hope you do not miss. He does not put the question in the same form to each. To the man he is forthright and blunt, "Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" But to the woman he puts the question much more softly and gently.

Every married man knows that his wife does not like a direct question. A man may say to his wife, "Where did you buy this meat?" Her answer is not, usually, "At Safeway," but perhaps, "What's wrong? Why do you ask?" or, "I bought it where I always buy it." If he says to her, "Have you seen so-and-so lately?" she says, "What's happened?" Or perhaps she says, "Well, I never get out to see anybody -- you know that." Or, "Why would I want to talk to her, anyway?"

It is comforting to me to realize how fully God understands women and to see him put the question to her very gently. He says, "Tell me in your own way now, what is this that you have done?" In their answer it is significant that both of them come out at the same place. Each blames someone else (we now call this human nature, it is so widespread, so universally true) but when they come to their final statement they both use exactly the same words, "and I ate."

That is where God is wanting to bring them. That is what the Bible calls repentance. It is a candid statement of the facts with no attempt now to evade them or to color them or clothe them in any other form. It is a simple, factual statement to which they are both reduced, "and I ate." This is the point God has been seeking to lead them to. Notice how these questions have followed a designed course. God has made them say, first, "We're not where we ought to be -- we know that. We ought not to be hidden here in the garden. We ought not to be lost. We ought not to require a question like this, 'Where are you?'" Then God has made them see, "It is because something has happened within us." They have seen that they are where they are because of what they are, and that it all happened because they disobeyed, because they ate the forbidden food, they sinned. God has led them gently, graciously and yet unerringly to the place where each of them, in his own way, has said, "Yes, Lord, I sinned; I ate."

That is as far as man can ever go in correcting evil. He can do no more than that. But that immediately provides the ground for God to act. This is where he constantly seeks to bring us, because it provides him with the only ground upon which he can act. You can see this throughout the whole Bible, in the Old and New Testament alike. When God is dealing with men he seeks to bring them to the place where they acknowledge what is wrong.

Remember Jesus' dealing with the woman of Samaria at the well? After they have been involved in some discourse about the meaning of the water wherein he awakened her curiosity and interest by offering her living water so that she would not have to come to the well to draw, then he forthrightly puts the demand, "Go and call your husband," John 4:16-18). That elicits from the woman the only answer she could honestly give. "I have no husband," she says. Then Jesus lays it right out before her. "That's true, you have no husband. You have had five husbands, and the man you are living with now is not your husband, in this you said truly." He commends her for speaking the truth and from that point on he moves to open her eyes to the character of the One who stands before her.

This is what God is wanting to do with us. He finds us in our failure, our estrangement, our guilt, our sense of nakedness and loss, and immediately he moves to bring us to repentance. We misunderstand his moving. We think he is dragging us before some tribunal in order to chastise us or to punish us, but he is not. He is simply trying to get us to face the facts as they are. That is what he does here with Adam and Eve. It is the same thing we say when we quote First John 1:9, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

Notice in this account that as soon as Adam and Eve say these magic words "and I ate," there are no more questions from God. There is no more prodding or probing on his part. God begins now to speak to the serpent, to the woman, and to the man. And what he declares now is not punishment. We shall look more closely at this in our next message. What he says to the man and the woman is not punishment, but grace. How badly we have misread these passages in Genesis. And when he gets through we read these wonderful words in Verse 21:

And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them. (Genesis 3:21 RSV)

Here is the beginning of animal sacrifices: God sheds blood in order to make clothing for Adam and Eve. He made them from the skins of animals and therefore those animal lives were sacrificed to clothe Adam and Eve. This is but a picture, as all animal sacrifices are but pictures -- a kind of kindergarten of grace -- in order to teach us the great truth that God eternally attempts to communicate to us as men and women. Ultimately, it is God himself who bears eternally the pain, the hurt, and agony of our sins. As John the Baptist said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away [who is continually taking away] the sin of the world," (John 1:29 RSV).

Paul uses a wonderful phrase in Ephesians, "accepted in the Beloved One," (Ephesians 1:6 KJV). When we have acknowledged our guilt, when we have acknowledged that what we have done is contrary to what God wants, and we stand there with nothing to defend ourselves with, and no attempt to do so, but simply in honest acknowledgment of our own doing, then, Paul says, we are "accepted in the Beloved One."

Growing up as a boy in Montana we had many sheep farms in our area. Spring was the lambing season when the little lambs were born. But spring in Montana is not like it is in California. Sleet storms can come whirling down out of the north, and snow can still be three or four feet deep on the prairies. Often there are long, protracted seasons of bitter cold during lambing season. Of course, when the sheep must bear lambs in that kind of weather, many of the lambs and ewes die. As a result, sheep farmers have many mothers whose newborn lambs have died, and many newborn lambs who mothers have died. It looks like a simple way to solve the problem would be to take the lambs without mothers and give them to the mothers without lambs, but, if you know anything at all about sheep, you know it is not that simple. If you take a little orphan lamb and put it in with a mother ewe, she will immediately go to it and sniff it all over, and then she shakes her head as though to say, "Well, that's not our family odor," and she butts it away and refuses to have anything to do with it. But the sheep men have devised a means of solving this. They take the mother's own little dead lamb and skin it, and take the skin and tie it onto the other little lamb, the orphan lamb. Then they put the little lamb with this ungainly skin flopping around eight legs, two heads, in with the mother. She pays no attention at all to the way it looks, but she sniffs it all over again, and then she nods her head. The little lamb goes to work at the milk fountain, and all is well.

What has happened? The orphan lamb has been accepted in the beloved one. There came a time when God's Lamb lay dead on our behalf and God took us orphans (he does it all the time) and clothed us in his righteousness, his acceptability, his dearness and nearness to him, and thus we stand "accepted in the Beloved One," received in his place. That is where repentance brings us.

But repentance is not only for the beginning of the Christian life. It is the way you start as a Christian, it is true. You come to God, like Adam and Eve, and say, "Yes, Lord, I'm the one, I've been running from you, I've been hiding from you, I've been estranged from you. It's because of what I've done. No one else is to blame but me." Then immediately God says, "I've taken care of all that. My Lamb has died for you and you stand in his place, acceptable to me." That is the way you begin the Christian life. But if you think that is where it ends, you are terribly wrong. Repentance is the basis upon which the whole Christian life is built. We must be continually repenting of those areas where we fail or fall back upon a way of living which God has said is not right. I find that, as a Christian, I am repenting far more than I ever did before -- about things I never dreamed of repenting of before -- because I am learning more and more that the Christian life is lived on a totally different basis. I find I must repent of my self-dependence -- and so must you.

If tomorrow morning you businessmen go back to your office, after counting on God and depending on him to help you to teach your Sunday school class, or whatever it is you do on Sunday, and then you step across the threshold of your office on Monday and say to yourself, "Aha, now I'm back where I can handle things. I've got everything under control now," you will need to repent of that. You cannot handle things any better there than you can here -- without him. "Without me," says the Lord Jesus, "you can do nothing," (John 15:5). If you attempt to do anything apart from that sense of dependence upon him to work through you, you need to repent, to change your mind, to accept again the covering of God, the clothing of his grace, the cleansing of his love.

This can, and perhaps will, occur dozens of times a day until we learn at last, little by little, to walk in this way, to count on his working. He is ours, and all that he is belongs to us. This is Standard Operating Procedure, not just emergency treatment.

We shall come back to this next time to look at those very remarkable words that God addresses to the serpent. But for the moment we leave Adam and Eve standing before God, having acknowledged their sin, having said the same thing about it that God said, having admitted that they did the thing God said was wrong. Immediately his whole relationship to them changed and he is on their side; he is for them, as Paul tells us, God is "for us" (Romans 8:31). He has been this way all along but Adam and Eve could not enjoy it until they repented. But now it is all clear.

Prayer:

Our Father, we thank you that we can echo with the Apostle Paul these words, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" If his love is made available to us then nothing can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. What can man do unto us? What is man that he can harm us or hurt us? Who can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord? We pray that this may have meaning for us not only on this Sunday but all through this week, as we learn to repent of our self-dependence and to cling consciously and helplessly to the continual flow of grace and strength from our loving God. We ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Respond and do something. Pray and decide what God wants to do in and through you in the future.

By faith receive the salvation God has provided.

3:1-6 Resist Temptation, we must 1. pray for strength to resists, 2. run, sometimes literally, and 3. say no when confronted with what we know is wrong. James 1:12 tells of the blessings and rewards for those who don't give in when tempted. 

3:1-6 We fall into trouble too, when we dwell on what God forbids rather than on the countless blessings and promises God has given us. The next time you are feeling sorry for yourself and what you don't have, consider all you DO have and thank God. Then your doubts won't lead you into sin. 

3:5 Sometime we have the illusion that freedom is doing anything we want. But God says that true freedom comes from obedience and knowing what not to do. The restrictions he gives us are for our own good, helping us avoid evil. We have the freedom to walk in front of a speeding car, but we don't need to be hit to realize it would be foolish to do so. Don't listen to Satan's temptations. You don't have to do evil to gain more experience and learn more about life. 

3:5 To become more like God is humanity's highest goal. It is what we are supposed to do. But Satan misled Eve concerning the right way to accomplish this goal. He told her that she could become more like God by defying God's authority, by taking God's place and deciding for herself what was best for her life. In effect, he told her to become her own god. But to become like God is not the same as trying to become God. Rather, it is to reflect his characteristics and to recognize his authority over your life. Like Eve, we often have a worthy goal but to try and achieve it in the wrong way. We act like a political candidate who pays off an election judge to be "voted" into office. When he does this, serving the people is no longer his highest goal. 

Self -exaltation leads to rebellion against God. As soon as we begin to leave God out of our plans, we are placing ourselves above him. This is exactly what Satan wants us to do. 

3:6 People usually choose wrong things because they have become convinced that those things are good, at least for themselves. Our sins do not always appear ugly to us, and the pleasant sins are the hardest to avoid. So prepare yourself for the attractive temptations that many come your way. We cannot always prevent temptation, but there is always a way of escape (1 Corinthians 10:13). Use God's Word and God's people to help you stand against it. 

3:7,8 A guilty conscience is a warning signal God placed inside you that goes off when you've done wrong. The worst step you can take is to eliminate the guilty feelings without eliminating the cause. That would be like using a painkiller but not treating the disease. Be glad those guilty feelings are there. They make you aware of your sin so you can ask God's forgiveness and then correct your wrongdoing.