“The Call, the Curse, & the Cure” (Genesis 1:26 - 3:24) | 4/12/20
Genesis 1:26 - 3:24 | 4/12/20 | Will DuVal
I invite you to open with me to the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible: Genesis. We just recently began a new sermon series at West Hills in the book of Genesis, and this MORNING, we are in arguably the most important section of the entire Bible, beginning here in Genesis ch.1, through the end of chapter 3. And that’s why I decided to STAY in our Genesis series this morning - this might be the first Easter sermon that ANY of y’all have ever heard from the Old Testament! But for SOME, it might be the first sermon PERIOD you’ve heard in a while - maybe you had a bad experience at other churches in the past but the online thing feels safer; maybe you’re honestly struggling right now to make sense of everything going on in our world and you’ve come here this morning looking for some answers - I’m so glad you did; you came to the right place: God’s word.
Genesis chs. 1-3 does a better job of introducing us to a biblical worldview than any other passage in all of Scripture.
Now: what is a “worldview”? Well, it’s just what it sounds like: it’s the way you view the world. For example, the various WORLD RELIGIONS are all worldviews. But EVERY worldview is trying to answer the same SIX basic questions. The 6 most important, foundational questions we ALL must answer in this life:
1) Who is God?
2) Why am I here?
3) How should I live?
4) What’s wrong with the world?
5) How does it get fixed?
6) What happens when I die?
How you ANSWER those 6 questions, will determine your “worldview”…
For example, a BUDDHIST worldview would respond:
1) There is NO God. And
2) The purpose of life is to ESCAPE existence. So
3) You should live morally and meditatively, according to the Noble Eightfold Path
Because #4) the PROBLEM with this world is its impermanence.
And #5) you alone can overcome it by achieving total, personal Enlightenment… nirvana…. But
6) if you FAIL to, then you get reincarnated to try all over again.
A SECULAR HUMANIST worldview proposes:
1) There is ALSO no God. And that means
2) YOU get to determine your life’s purpose. And
3) So long as you don’t infringe on anyone ELSE’S rights, you are free to live however you want. But keep in mind
4) There is real SUFFERING in the world. And...
5) The solution for the world’s problems is US. Humanity. Given enough evolution as a species, and enough education, and we can overcome disease, racism, global warming… ANYTHING we put our minds to. Yet
6) ultimately, we have no soul, and when we die, we’re simply gone; this life is all that there is, so you better enjoy it while it lasts.
Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, Agnosticism, the list is long. But this morning, I want to show you the BIBLE’S answers to all SIX of those questions, and they’re ALL found right here in the opening 3 chapters of Genesis.
But first, let me give you just one more worldview - in 2005, sociologist Christian Smith coined the term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” to describe what HE found in his research to be the dominant religion in America today. Smith discovered that most Americans still CALL themselves Christians because they simply don’t have the LANGUAGE for it, but this worldview is SO different from biblical Christianity that he coined the new term - Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. And here are ITS basic tenets:
1) God created the world, but passively watches over it.
2) We are here because we make God happy, and specifically...
3) It makes GOD happy when WE are happy. So we should be nice to others, so as not to prevent THEM from being happy, but pursue our OWN personal happiness as well.
4) Problems exist because most people AREN’T that happy, and they take it out on others, but MOREOVER, because God IS so passive, He doesn’t get very INVOLVED in our world to help out (I mean, if He DID, if God truly CARED, we wouldn’t have things like coronaviruses, right?).
And so #5) the solution is to simply try your best to be a good person, and if you DO...
6) If you’re good ENOUGH, God lets most people into heaven when they die.
That’s what the MAJORITY of Americans today believe. AND it’s what they believe that the Bible TEACHES. Soooo… DOES it? Let’s take those questions one at a time…
1) Who is God?
We begin at the VERY beginning, chapter 1, verse 1. We hear: “In the beginning, God” And in those 4 words alone, we discover the most CRUCIAL truth about who God is: God is PREEMINENT. He is PRIMARY. Supreme. Surpassing. Superior. Right off the bat, the Bible confronts us with the uncomfortable reality that we exist within GOD’S story, HIS world, that HE created for HIS glory and HIS own purposes. That we are NOT in fact the center of the universe. ALL of it, according to Colossians 1:16, exists “from God and FOR God”. He is both the AUTHOR and the AIM of everything! So in just four words, the Bible puts God in HIS place, and us in ours. Preeminent Creator // Subordinate creatures.
Now, if we read on, the REST of chapter 1 outlines NINETEEN additional attributes of God’s character that we have studied these past 2 weeks here - God is Creator, Powerful, Dynamic, Involved, Communicative, Good, Orderly, Purposeful, Life-Giver, Caring, Creative, Trinitarian, Relational, Empowering, Manifold, Hierarchical, Provider, Thorough, and the STANDARD to which you and I are held and BY which we will all one day be judged.
That’s who God is. And that’s ALL in Genesis 1. And BECAUSE that’s who God is, we get our answer to question #2:
2) Why am I here? The short answer is: God created us to reflect HIS glory.
Let’s skip ahead to v26 of ch.1 - “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image… And God blessed them.” (26-28)
Now, there’s been a lot of discussion, through the ages, about what it means for humans to be uniquely made - no other animal in creation is made - in the image of God, the imago dei. Is it our consciousness / that we are uniquely self-aware creatures, or our conscience / that we are predisposed towards morality, or perhaps our unique capacity for relationship with God, or is it our SPIRITS, that humans alone have an eternal part of us that lives on after our death?
I think ALL those things are true. But most LITERALLY, to be made in the IMAGE of God, the Hebrew concept here, is to be made a REFLECTION of God. The picture we get is God looking in a MIRROR, and seeing his own image or reflection. That is why He created us.
Psalm 19 says that all of CREATION declares the glory of God. But we humans alone are a direct REFLECTION of His glory.
As a FATHER, I can see a REFLECTION of myself in my daughter. I look at her, and I see half of ME. I see me in her eyes, in her smile. In her curiosity and her sense of humor, AND in her stubbornness and her short-temperedness.
In the same way, God created US so that when he LOOKS at us, He might see glorious reflections of Himself. We have the highest calling in the UNIVERSE!
Isaiah 43:7 - God says: “everyone who is called by my name… I created for my glory, I formed and made.””
Are you starting to see the GOOD news of Christianity? There IS a God, and He is AWESOME. WORTHY of all glory. Moreover, He created YOU in His own very good image; you are the culmination of ALL His creation, uniquely designed to BRING Him the glory He deserves. What an HONOR. But it gets even BETTER...
Because 3) How should we live? The Bible’s answer is: according to God’s life-GIVING commands.
God gives us just THREE commands in Genesis chapters 1 & 2, and they’re all CONNECTED by one theme: God is all about LIFE, human FLOURISHING.
PRODUCE life: ch1, v28 - “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” God wants to fill the whole EARTH with more image-bearers of His glory. So He commands us to make BABIES! Reflect my image as CREATOR, and make LIFE yourselves.
PROMOTE life: v28 again - He says, “Subdue the earth.” v26: “Have dominion over it.” That doesn’t mean “exploiting it for our OWN selfish purposes”; it means CARING for the earth; reflecting GOD’S great LOVE and CARE for His creation. In ch2, v15 we hear: “God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” We are called to cultivate and to nurture life. And #3...
“God commanded the man, saying... “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”” (2:16-17) - the third and final command is to PRESERVE life: trust ME to be your God, you don’t even need to know good from evil, we were designed for CHILDLIKE faith - simply trust in me, God says, and you will PRESERVE your life. He commands us NOT to eat something that’s going to kill us.
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See, a lot people have this flawed perception of God. Call it bad PR. The church today has unfortunately become known more for what we’re AGAINST than what we stand FOR. So people have this image of God as like the “Fun Police”, sitting up in Heaven, with His badge and His billy club, handing out tickets all day long.
But Jesus calls Him “a God of LIFE!” (Luke 20:38) In fact, Jesus didn’t get along so well with the religious people of His day, the 1st c. “fun police”. He called them “hypocrites” and “whitewashed tombs”. And they called HIM a “glutton and a drunkard”. Because apparently Jesus knew how to have a good time. He knew that life was made for LIVING. Jesus HIMSELF says in John 10:10 that He came to bring us “life to the FULLEST” - That’s the very reason He CAME, friends!
THAT’S what God wants for us. He really DOES want us to be happy; He just claims to know how to MAKE us truly happy, better than WE do ourselves. So we ought to live according to HIS life-GIVING commands. Psalm 119 says “I will never forget your precepts, for by them you give me life.” (v93)
And Genesis 2:25 gives us a picture of what THAT kind of life looks like: “the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” The most beautiful verse in the Bible. Can you imagine, standing physically, emotionally, psychologically, relationally NAKED, laid completely BARE for all the world to see, and experiencing ABSOLUTELY no guilt, no shame, no need to hide. Being utterly exposed, KNOWN to your very CORE, the deepest part of your soul, and yet, feeling unconditionally LOVED and accepted exactly as you are. That is our heart’s greatest LONGING, isn’t it friends? Isn’t that true for YOU?
So what went wrong? Question #4. The short answer is: WE did. We read in chapter 3:
“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’?” 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, 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.”
Hiding. Guilt. Shame. For the first time ever. WHY? Because they wanted to be like God. That was the serpent’s temptation: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil”. And just like ALL of Satan’s lies, Jesus calls him the “father of lies”, “the deceiver of the whole WORLD”, Satan is clever enough to COUCH his lies in a HALF-truth: it is TRUE that they now know good and evil, their eyes ARE opened, but they are NOT like God.
God is the good, life-GIVER. But Adam & Eve’s disobedience has now invited DEATH into the world. Romans 5:12 says, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”. You might hear “sin” and think MURDER. Adultery. The “really bad ones”. But the Bible’s bar is MUCH lower; the word for “sin” just means “missing the mark”. Remember: we were created to reflect God’s glory. But the Bible says we have ALL sinned; we’ve ALL failed to do that, to actually bring God the unequalled, undivided, unadulterated GLORY that He deserves. Romans 3:23 - “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
If we point fingers at Adam & Eve we miss the point, friends; I am Adam, YOU are Eve. Put us in the same situation, and we’ll fall JUST as far short. We do it every DAY, don’t we? We’re no different than them - in OUR pride, we too want to become gods unto ourselves. We too want to usurp God’s throne and His position of preeminence. Our fastest growing worldviews are the PROOF! Secular humanism: “There IS no God; YOU are god.” That’s what Moralistic Therapeutic Deism really boils down to - God exists for ME, to make ME happy in this life, and to give me some vague sense of hope and comfort for the AFTER-life.
And if you closely examine every other worldview out there, they are ALL proposing the same basic SOLUTION to the world’s problems of sin, suffering, & evil. Judaism’s mitzvah’s, Islam’s 5 pillars, Hinduism’s karma; their common proposed cure is: just try HARDER. Do BETTER.
And Christianity ALONE has the AUDACITY to ask the tough, but all-important question: How GOOD is good ENOUGH? I mean, if you imagine God placing ALL your deeds from your entire life, on His cosmic scale, the GOOD on this side, and the BAD over here, what kind of balance do YOU think you would NEED to IMPRESS God? How much of YOUR good would be SUFFICIENT to SWAY the preeminent, almighty, perfectly HOLY, righteous Creator of the Universe?! To make HIM, impressed with YOU?
Christianity ALONE dares to WARN us: “When you GET to the gates of Heaven and God asks why He should let you in, WHATEVER you do, DON’T appeal to YOUR OWN track record! Your own best attempts at being ‘good enough’.”
Because Christianity alone confronts us with the harsh reality that “We cannot be the solution to the world’s problem; because we ARE the problem.” That’s like using the opened jar of marinara sauce to get the stain out you just made. It makes no SENSE!
According to the Bible, the problem with the world isn’t the coronavirus.
The problem isn’t even the suffering that this virus is CAUSING.
That’s merely symptomatic, of the REAL problem, our ROOT problem: US. Our SIN.
Our sin causes death. Yes, physical death. But the virus of sin is FAR more dangerous than coronavirus. Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid of being PHYSICALLY killed; that’s gonna happen eventually anyway. 100% of people DIE. It makes no sense to live your life trying to avoid the inevitable. INSTEAD, focus on where you’re HEADED! You should be concerned about dying SPIRITUALLY.” ETERNALLY. That’s the death Adam & Eve suffered. Remember, God had warned them, “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely DIE” (2:17). Satan promised, “No you WON’T”. Another half-truth. They DIDN’T die, physically. But their SPIRITS, uniquely designed by God for relationship with Him, perfect UNION with Him, are now severed, cut off FROM Him. 1 John 1:5 says “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”. God has nothing to do with sin.
So when God shows up in v8 for their daily stroll through the Garden together in the cool of the day, on THIS day, “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord”, because as Adam explains to God, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid”.
Sin brings death. Death of relationship. And not just with GOD. After hiding from Him, the very next thing Adam & Eve do, in vv12 & 13, is blame ONE ANOTHER - “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.”” And notice how their sin destroys all THREE of God’s life-giving callings on their lives:
They were CALLED to produce life, to be fruitful and multiply; now Eve is CURSED to do that in pain: “To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” (3:16)
They were CALLED to promote life, to have dominion and care for the earth; now Adam is CURSED to do that in toil and hardship: “And to Adam he said, “...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” (3:17-18).
And they were CALLED to preserve life, to trust God and LIVE, but now they are CURSED to die; not only spiritually, but physically too: “you [will] return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”” (3:19)
Now at this point in the sermon, you’re probably thinking: “This is the WORST Easter message I’ve ever heard! Here you guys were, selling “good news” and HOPE, but none of this sounds very good or hopeful to me!”
Well hang tight, because this sermon is titled “The Call, the Curse, and the CURE” for a reason, and we’re finally ready to answer Question #5: How does ALL of this get FIXED? This is like when your favorite band waits until the ENCORE to play everyone’s favorite song. But I’m here to tell you: the whole ALBUM is good, friends.
It’s GOOD that God is preeminent; it fills our universe with meaning.
It’s GOOD that we’re created in His image for His glory, it fills our LIVES with meaning.
It’s GOOD that he calls us to follow His life-GIVING ways.
And believe it or not, it’s EVEN good that you and I are the answer to what’s wrong with the world, because it means that we don’t have to bear the WEIGHT of trying to be the cure. Praise GOD, He has provided another one.
And God’s prescribed cure is PROPHESIED, right here in Genesis 3:15, just 9 verses after Eve’s fateful bite of the fruit; God says to Satan: “I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall crush your head,
and you shall strike his heel.””
Bible nerds call this the protoeuangelion - literally, the “first gospel”, the first prophetic GLIMPSE of God’s great plan to rescue and REDEEM the world from the curse of sin.
Here’s how He does it: God puts “enmity”, hostility, NOT ONLY between Satan and Eve, but between their offspring. Those religious leaders I mentioned, who didn’t get along with Jesus, who hated him so much they CRUCIFIED him, Jesus called them “children of their father, the devil” (Jn 8:44). Meanwhile, wanna guess whose descendant JESUS is? The Gospel of Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy all the way back to Adam and Eve. So what we have here, THOUSANDS of years before Jesus even came to earth, is a prophecy in chapter THREE of the Bible, that this conflict between Satan and humanity, our war against evil and sin, will be waged generation after generation after generations... until FINALLY, a singular offspring comes, whose heel Satan will “strike”, but in return, He will CRUSH Satan’s head.
And friends, when Jesus took His last breath on the cross and uttered: “It is FINISHED”, what SATAN heard was: “I Surrender; Satan - you WIN.” And for 3 days, it appeared as though the prophetic venom in Christ’s heel really had inflicted a MORTAL wound.
But then the THIRD day came. And when Jesus’ female followers came to the tomb to anoint his wounds, there were none to be FOUND. Cuz not only was the SNAKE-bite gone; so was his HEEL! His whole body! What they DID find was an angel of God, who asked them very matter-of-factly, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; He has risen!” (Luke 24:5)
The snake may have won the battle, but JESUS conquered DEATH ITSELF as living proof that He had won the war! Hebrews 2:14-15 proclaims, “Through death he destroyed the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and delivered all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” Satan had rightful, legal claim over our lives and our eternal, spiritual fates, by virtue of our sin. We were SLAVES to sin, God says. But Jesus RANSOMED us from the slavery of sin and the death we deserved by His death in our place on the cross, and by his glorious resurrection FROM the dead. Colossians 2 declares, “You, who were dead in your trespasses (sins)... God made alive together with him (Jesus), having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. [NONE of us has the kind of spiritual CREDIT it would take to pay the debt we owe God because of our sin. And yet] This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. [But he didn’t just stop there. Because if the cross paid our debt; then the empty tomb was the RECEIPT proving the check had cleared. That Jesus...] 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.”
How does the world get FIXED? How does our SIN, that is the root CAUSE of all that is wrong in the world, get FIXED? It GOT fixed, past tense, 2,000 years ago, when Jesus walked out of the grave.
You say, “Wait a minute - there still seems to be plenty of SIN around to me! And Christians don’t seem to be IMMUNE to it, either!”
And that’s true. When Jesus died the death we deserve on the cross, he paid the PENALTY for our sin. Cancelled the record of debt. And when he rose from the dead, He gave us the POWER over sin. Romans 6:4 says, “just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” We don’t HAVE to sin any longer. Once, we were enslaved. Didn’t even have a choice - sin ruled the day. But Christians no longer treat sin as an inevitability in our lives, because Jesus has raised us to new life in Him: “our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” (Rom 6:6). But even though we don’t HAVE to sin any longer, we still fail to walk in newness of life all the time. We STILL fall short of God’s glory. So we await the day when Jesus RETURNS, or calls us home to Heaven, when we will at last be free from the very PRESENCE of sin. No more sin.
Now, that is all AMAZING news. Whether you believe it’s TRUE or not, I hope you can at least appreciate how AWESOME the good news of Jesus is. Why we Christians get so pumped up to celebrate Easter - His resurrection.
But we’ve still got one question left to answer: #6) What happens when I die?
So let’s head back to Genesis ch.3 for two closing observations: we are left with two POWERFUL, contrasting images at the end of this chapter:
In v23 we hear: “the Lord God sent [them] out from the garden of Eden”. Paradise LOST.
And, friends, like the Garden of Eden, Heaven is a perfect place designed for perfect people; you wanna know what the standard is, to be good enough to get into Heaven? Jesus makes it really clear in Matthew 5:48 “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” If you’re perfect, welcome in! Otherwise, you’re back to question #4: you got a problem.
But we’ve already prescribed HIM as our cure, and we get a powerful prefiguring of Christ’s sacrificial death in our place, right here in v21: “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” God offers HIMSELF the first sacrifice in history, on behalf of Adam and Eve, for their sake, and symbolically COVERS them in the dead animal’s skins. The biblical word for this is kaphar, ATONEMENT, it means to COVER. See, it’s not just that God can’t have anything to do with sin; God’s justice demands that He PUNISH sin. For God to turn a blind eye to sin would be unjust. Sin demands death. So God provides SACRIFICE as the means of payment, an atoning death, a covering of the punishment for sin.
What happens when we die? The Bible says: It depends on what you’re wearing. NO ONE is gonna stand before almighty God “Naked and unashamed”. Listen to how the Isaiah prophetically praised GOD for the coming Messiah, 700 years before Jesus’ birth: “my soul shall exult in my God,
for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation;
he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (61:10)
So I ask you this morning, friends: what will YOU be wearing? When YOU stand before His throne in Heaven on that day? Your OWN righteousness? Or Christ’s?
Let’s PRAY...