When God Went Looking

Transcript

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[0:00] Well, let's go to the sermon, and the sermon text is Genesis 2.25, pardon me, 2.25 through 3.13. But before that, two things that are kind of related. One is, I have a little bit of a cough because I breathed in some weird yard dust. I was raking a lot of things yesterday, and yard dust went in my lungs, and now I'm coughing. And so the other thing is, this morning I was coughing.

[0:31] That wasn't a real cough, so don't worry. And I was sitting next to Asher, and you know how you do this? You're like, I said, what's wrong with me? And Asher, without missing a beat, said, many things. I was like, you're 11, but out of the mouths of babes comes the wisdom that's beyond all measure. And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's right, because I'm a fallen, broken person. If I were to say what's wrong with me, the answer absolutely is many, many, many things. I was thankful to God this morning for my son, who's 11 years old, who reminded me of God's wisdom. Yes, because of the fall of man and woman, I have all sorts of problems.

[1:19] I'll just say that. Thank you. I've got one. Thanks. Everybody got what they need? Okay. Be sure to keep the pen if you like it, because it's a great pen. Okay. On to our introduction. So we're in the second week of an eight-week sermon series called Rescue, the Bible in Eight Weeks. And last week, we talked about the creation. This week, the fall. And after that, it's the promised land, the promised king, exile and return, the life of Jesus, Pentecost and the church, and then finally, the future hope. And so, as best we can, in eight weeks, we're going to get a survey of the Bible. Not the whole Bible, but these big themes in the Bible and this theme that runs without it, which is that God wants to rescue his people and his creation. Last week, we saw that God rescues us from nonexistence. He rescues us from the void of not actually existing. He calls into being things that do not yet exist and gives life to things that are dead. And he creates. He created us not because he had to. He created the world not because he had to, but because he wanted to. That's a very important distinction. Because he wanted to create something beautiful and he wanted humans as the pinnacle of his creation to help him care for his creation.

[2:41] And to be creators themselves of a lower order, but yet to be creators themselves. And so humans, as we'll see in this week, continue to be creators, but not in a way that God had hoped for. So we'll look at that a little bit later. So that was God's goal. So God always had a reason for creating things. And he had a desire to live with us in the garden, taking care of the garden, being in relationship with us. And that was what he wanted. He wanted this closeness with us because he looked at what he made and he said, it is very, very, very good. All of it, including the humans.

[3:18] So this week, we're going to look at the fall into the beauty and goodness of what God created. Evil appears and it disappears. It deceives humankind and the consequences of that we are living with to this very day, as I'm sure you understand. So let's go to our reading is Genesis 2. I'll start at verse 25.

[3:38] Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame. The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees? In the garden.

[3:57] Of course, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. The woman replied, it's only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, you must not eat it or even touch it. If you do, you will die.

[4:13] You won't die. The serpent replied to the woman. God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it. And you will be like God, knowing both good and evil. The woman. Was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious. And she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it too. At that moment, their eyes were opened and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves.

[4:52] When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the woman and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the Lord God among the trees. Then the Lord God called to the man. Where are you?

[5:09] He replied, I heard you walking in the garden. So I hid. I was afraid because I was naked. Who told you that you were naked? The Lord God asks. Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?

[5:25] The man replied, it was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit and I ate it. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this word, this difficult word. We ask that you would add your blessing to it and you already have in Jesus name. Amen.

[5:42] All right. Well, let's do one more thing. I think we might try this every week. We'll see how it goes. How do great novels begin? Who knows the first line of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy? It's a classic. Pam does. No.

[5:58] Yes. All happy families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So true. That's not just random. We'll get back to that. We're going to come back to that one. Thank you, Tolstoy. But let's go to your sheet now. We can bring up the first one. So the Bible is a book about God. That was the answer last week. But we're going to kind of expand that one to say the Bible is a book about God. Rescuing us. There we go. Love it. See, we're kind of getting ahead of the technology here. So let's take a look at our scripture again. Just real quick.

[6:35] This is a familiar passage to us, right? But there's some wrinkles in it that we don't always see. And I think we're going to find some of them this morning. I'm excited about that. But in essence, Eve is deceived by the serpent. By the way, it says serpent, not snake. And it's not an apple. It's a snake. It's a fruit. But it could be an apple. It doesn't say it is an apple. It just says fruit. And it says serpent, not snake. There's other words for snakes than serpents, OK? And the serpent can talk. So there's some interesting things going on in the garden. At least one of the animals that God created could talk. Interesting. All right. Also, he was shrewd. OK. So there's a lot going on in the garden that sort of I wish we had more scripture about, like a little more detail about how the whole garden was organized and what all the different animals were. But what all the different animals said and did the dogs just say squirrel, squirrel, squirrel all the time? Or what are they saying when they're barking? I mean, I kind of have an idea. But I think it's basically squirrel. I mean, that's 90% of what they say. And then 10% is like food.

[7:40] But they would have said it. Maybe they would have said it. They would have been like squirrel food, squirrel. So Eve is deceived. Then she gives the fruit to Adam, who it seems was with her kind of for this whole thing, but pretty silent. violent. Is he deceived or does he just go along with it? They don't explain it. So there's some sort of areas where we can go, what is going on in this story? But I would always say that we have enough to get what God wants us to get. So that's, you could pine about missing details all day long, but it's not going to help you that much. It's fun to think about, but God gives us enough to know what he wants us to know. And what he wanted us to know in this case is at least that the serpent was a deceiver. He told the best kind of lie, I guess the most effective lie, which is a half lie or a half truth. If it's an outright lie, you can spot it. But if you tell half a truth and half a lie, it can kind of sneak in. So he was telling the truth. They would know the difference between good and evil. They would, and they would die, but not instantly, right? And sin would, but sin would begin the slow process of killing them because of God's judgment.

[8:57] And the serpent said, you'll be like God, but they already were like God. They were created in God's image. And I think they understood that. But I think, so the serpent wasn't saying that, but the serpent was almost saying you will become equal to God. You will become equal to God in power or ability. And that was definitely a lie, that they were not going to become on the level. The creature was not going to come. They were going to come to the level of the creator. That would never happen. And so the serpent is shrewd. He tells a smart lie, a lie that's designed to get them to break the one commandment that God had given them. Do not eat this fruit in the middle of it from the tree in the middle of the garden. And if you don't, everything's fine. If you do, then something bad will happen. Okay. And so what happens after that, I think is sort of an unappreciated part of the Bible.

[9:54] Right own ability to do things. Now that sounds strange and what I want to, I really want to make sure you understand that when we say that God limits God's own ability to do something, it does not, we're not saying that God can't do a thing or that God isn't powerful enough to do a thing, but that God chooses to limit God's own power in that moment for a particular reason, which we'll get to in a moment. And so some people don't agree with this and that's okay, but the idea is that God coming down, looking for Adam and Eve in the evening breeze. Now think about God. God is this sort of sitting at the throne above all, all the created order. We talked about this last week, the heavenly hosts, and yet he's able to go into the garden and and ! This is important. He waits till evening time. It's hot during the day and the evening, the breezes come out, it's more comfortable. Why does God care about comfort? Can't God snap his fingers and create an air conditioner and just have it blow on his face, right? God could. And what are Adam and Eve doing? They might be working all day. He had told them to take care of the garden. He had told them to name all the animals and make sure the dogs were fed and all that stuff, you

[11:35] know? 06 08 09 waiting for them to finish their day. And he wanted to walk with them like maybe he did every day, in the cool of the evening breeze. He wanted to be in the beauty of his own creation with his creatures and walk with them and talk with them and say, how was your day today? Did you see any squirrels? Whatever, whatever it was. So he wanted this relationship with them. And when he entered the garden in that state, he wanted it to be cool. He wanted it to be, he limited himself in time. So he limited himself in time. He limited himself in what he, his need for comfort. This is interesting. And he limited his own knowledge.

[12:20] Now again, I'm not saying that God couldn't know where Adam and Eve was. He absolutely could. But when he entered the garden at this time, he chose not to know. He limited his own ability for the sake of relationship with the people. He wanted to be with them as somebody who could have a mutual relationship with them. Now you can't have a mutual relationship with somebody that if you know, think about this, try to have a conversation where you know exactly what they're going to say next because you're omniscient. That's no fun for you or for them. That's not a relationship. That's a very vertical relationship. But God wanted this horizontal relationship with Adam and Eve. This is a difficult concept, okay? But it's a very important one. And so God limited himself. He went looking for them, but he didn't know where they were. He didn't know yet that they had eaten the fruit. He didn't know. He limited his own knowledge of that. Yes, God is omniscient, but he limited his ability to know this. He limited his ability to find them. So he calls out for them. Why else would he call out for them? Now some people will say, and this is fine. You can disagree. Some people say this is all sort of a rhetorical style where he,

[13:36] he knows exactly where they are, but he's asking anyway so that they will answer and see their own failure. And that, that could be, that is absolutely a rhetorical style that you sometimes see in the Bible where somebody asks a question they already know the answer to. But I think this is what's going on here, is that God wants to be with his own creatures, and he wants, but he, but to do that in a mutual way that's meaningful, relationally, he limits his own self. Okay, you're getting tired of that. I am too.

[14:08] So let's go to the next one. God is self-limiting for the sake of relationship. He wants to have a relationship with his people. It has to be a mutual relationship. He's still God, but it has to be a little closer to the horizontal so that he can do that. Let me give you a good example of, I would, I as an adult, as a parent, I sometimes limit my own power. And one example would be if I kept tying my child's shoes for them when they're little, that's a great thing to do because it's fast. You know, you tie your child's shoe when it's, because it's fast, right? But at some point, I teach them how to do it, and then I have to wait for them to do it. And that takes time, and I get to watch them make a mistake, and I get to teach them all over again. And so I limit this ability to, you know, to control their shoelaces at all times because I want them to grow up into people who know how to tie their shoes. And they don't. No, I'm kidding. They do. They do. Some of them do. We'll see. It doesn't matter. But so that's kind of that thing is as a parent, I can limit my own ability for the sake of that relationship with my child and so that they grow into the people that I hope they'll become because I know how to tie my shoes.

[15:23] I don't have Velcro shoes. I don't think I do. Maybe one or two, but it doesn't matter. Okay. So here's what's partly important about this is that God is disappointed. He's disappointed because of the sin. He's disappointed because of the commandment that was broken. But he's also grieved because a relationship he was hoping to have with his creatures was now not going to work out. He wanted to walk with them every day when their work was done. He wanted to walk in the evening breeze and enjoy his creation with his creatures. But now that they had done this, they weren't able to stay in the garden anymore. So I think God was also sad because that walking together time. Was going to have to come to an end. He wasn't going to be able to appear to them that way anymore, at least not every day.

[16:14] So this is what this kind of relationship is what he wanted to get back to. And this is what has been lost in the fall. Not just innocence, but also this easy and mutual relationship between God and his people that he really cared about. Okay. So the people have made a big, big mistake. Okay. And the first thing that God does after sort of interrogating them, of course, is to, is to give them a rescue plan. He's like, already, I know what I need to do for you guys. Adam and Eve are naked. This is the only Bible passage where the word naked shows up three times. And if the younger kids here, they'd be snickering, you know, cause it's so funny. But but this is how they were. They were innocent and they were, they had nothing to fear. They had nothing to fear in the garden. It was all fine. It was a safe place. It was a safe place. But God knew that the world that they were about to enter had good weather, bad weather, wild animals, thorns, all sorts of things. They needed, they were going to start needing shoes. They were going to start needing sturdier clothes than just leaves. Right.

[17:20] And so the first thing he does is he acknowledges that yes, they are vulnerable and they are naked. And so he, and also because of their modesty, he gives them clothes that God himself makes. Cause he says, you're going to have to go out and walk. You're going to have to go into this world. You're going to have to go into this world. You're going to have to go into this world. But this isn't just a wardrobe upgrade. Don't think that this is just about clothing. It's not just about clothing. It's that God is saying to his people, the world is going to be dangerous. So I need to equip you for a dangerous world. And it's not just clothing. I need to give you all sorts of other things to protect you from evil and brokenness that you've brought into this world. And sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not going to work. Right. Even, even your, even your best clothes are going to develop holes in them in some sense. Right. And in some time.

[18:11] So it says, if you want to look at the next thing on your sheet, it says after the fall, God rescues Adam and Eve from exposure, exposure, but that's all sorts of things. It's not just climate exposure. It's exposure to the evil that they themselves have brought in to the world or allowed to come into the world is exposure to those things that they're vulnerable to. And so God, God isn't willing to just let them into that world without some kind of protection, but it's not a hundred percent protection. And yet, yes, they're possible infinite lifespans in the garden. Maybe, you know, their immortality has now been traded in and they will eventually die. And that was, that was true. That was true what God had said about them.

[18:59] So what else immediately flows from the fall? This is an important category. The reason we spending a whole day on this. I spent a whole week on this is such an important category because it sets the tone for all the rest of the Bible. And it, it, that's the, the rest of everything we're talking about is how is God going to rescue us from the consequence, some of the consequences of what has happened here in this moment, right?

[19:22] So what flows from the fall? There's a loss of innocence. There is a knowledge of good and evil, which may mean that the human mind know now knew how to communicate. They know how to commit evil and could scheme ways of doing it. So I would love to think that before this happened, Adam and Eve didn't even know what evil was, much less how to do an evil thing, much less how to lie about it or be sneaky about it or be malevolent about it or be sort of premeditated about it. They just, they, that was not in their ability yet, but by, by falling that entered into them and it entered into the world.

[20:03] So as soon as they eat it, they understand evil. Not only that, they're tempted to further evil. So if, if Adam, the innocent Adam, before he had eaten it, if he had been asked a question like, what did you do? He would have said, oh, absolutely. I ate that fruit and I guess I shouldn't have, I'm sorry. You know, that's what Adam would have said. Just straight up truth. But what does Adam say?

[20:36] The woman you gave me, which is terrible. The woman you gave me gave it to me and I ate it like I had no, I had no agency of my own. Right. And then of course, God says, well, what God to, I don't know why he doesn't stick with Adam a little longer and say, why don't you make your own decisions, sir? You know, but it goes to the woman says, why did you eat it? And she says, this serpent, you know, so this, this, this blame thing just starts. And instead of the good and innocent of them going, we did something wrong. We shouldn't have done that. And we're going to tell the truth about it. There's this deflection away from my own responsibility onto somebody else. And so there's this pattern of sin entering the world is it's like, it just kind of keeps like a snowball that rolls down a hill. It gets bigger and heavier and faster, the more it goes. And so one sin begets another. And it escalated that you could say that escalated quickly. If you want to say it that way, that escalated quickly so that when we get to Genesis four, um, we, well, we'll hear about, actually, we know that it wasn't so happy in the first family either. One of the sons kills the other son murders him right in cold blood. When we get to Genesis four, we hear that Cain's great, great grandson Lamech decides

[21:55] to kill a man. And he boasts of being 11 times more vengeful. Then Cain, he's boasting about it. So there's this sense that after four generations, somebody says, yeah, I'm, I'm even worse than my ancestors. There's this kind of growing sense that sin is now just rampant in the world. And so there's this sort of cascade of sin and sin seeks to corrupt this once beautiful function, our creativeness such that fallen humanity invents new ways of sinning. So the creativeness that God gave us. Instead of creating beautiful things, which we can still do, we're also good at creating new ways of sinning. Isn't that great? You often think that, you know, the way there's fraud in the world, the amount of people who are so creative in how they do fraud, that takes so much work. If they just took that ingenuity and just put it into a business to make money, they might've even made more and they would have done it honestly. But I think there's obviously there's something in there that in them that's like, no, but I could steal it. That's more fun, right? We, the sin kind of feeds on itself. And I think that's where our quote from Tolstoy comes in. Happy families are all alike because there's one thing that makes them all happy, which

[23:10] is they love each other and they have good relationships with each other. But an unfab unhappy families have invented or created a multitude of ways to be miserable, each one different from the other. So I think Tolstoy was right, but I want you to listen to this. This is from Romans 1 29. This is the apostle Paul. He's talking about the evilness in the world. Paul says this, they have become filled with every kind of wickedness. We're talking now about how sin gets worse and worse and worse. They have been filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. There's a lot of words in here that just sound bad. Okay. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers. Are you getting tired of this yet? God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. So inventive. Human beings are inventive, at least where evil is concerned. They disobey their parents. Yeah, that's right. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

[24:20] Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things. But also approve of those who practice them. Isn't that depressing? That's the creativeness that has been converted or subverted into creativeness just to invent new ways of sinning. There's other depressing Bible passages like this. They're shorter. Judges 21, 25. In those days, there was no king in Israel. All the people did was what was right in their own eyes. And the subtext there is it was just chaos. And brokenness in Israel. And then Genesis 6, 5 and 6, Adele read this. The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of their thoughts and their hearts was only evil continually.

[25:14] And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So not only is sin a terrible problem for humans, but it spirals out of control. And so if you want to look at the next thing on your sheet, it says that sin is a spiral.

[25:30] Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? let this stand. He realizes that this thing has been let loose on the earth. And it's not in just one vector. It's not just going towards one thing. It's spreading out, branching out, and it's taking over all of his creation.

[26:10] And so God has to find some way to curtail it, but also to retain our agency, our ability, so that he doesn't turn us into robots and make us not sinners just by snapping his fingers. So God has to rescue us from this situation, but he has to do it in a particular way. And it's not just one thing. For starters, he acknowledges that Adam and Eve have lost their innocence, and so he protects their modesty with clothing, and he protects them from the world. So he gives them the ability to protect themselves from violence. Doesn't always work, though. It didn't work for Abel, right? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. None of these interventions are perfect. None of these are perfect. None of these are sort of ultimate things that God, like, God will not protect me if I run across a freeway 100 times out of 100. Do you get that? Like, if I do that, I can't tempt God by doing that and saying, God better save me. He may not. He may. I would love it, but I'm not going to count on it because that's foolishness. So God gives us some ability to protect ourselves, but we can't protect ourselves from anything, and that's a very important thing to learn about life is there's all sorts of things that we absolutely can't protect ourselves from.

[27:27] And that's hard, but that's the result of the fall. So he gets them to start tying their own shoes, in effect. He says they leave the garden. They have to make their way in the world. Probably teaches them how to farm, teaches them how to catch food. Maybe he gives them the dog as a companion, which I think is true. Like, if you have a dog, you know, it's like proof that God exists because they're such wonderful animals. I'm talking about dogs a lot today, but that's OK.

[27:53] And despite all the evil in the world, they begin human life with this sort of this mixture of joy and pain. They start to have a family, but that goes poorly. Do you see how there's a mixed bag here? Like, there's all sorts of joy that comes into this early family. There's all sorts of tragedy that comes into this early family. There's all sorts of brokenness. And so you find God's good creation existing next to the decay of nature and the decay of the creation and the evil, which is always trying to expand and God always trying to give us, give his people the tools to sort of contain it and carve out a life for themselves that will be protected. So he gives other protections from sin. None of them work as well as he hopes they will because it doesn't depend on him. It depends on the people, right? And part of the rest of this series is we're going to be looking at many of the ways that he extends a rescue to his people that, you know, that sort of work and sort of don't work because it rely, it depends on the people cooperating with it in a lot of ways. And so some of them are going to help. Humans fail to take, basically, it's like a life preserver.

[29:04] You can throw a life preserver to somebody who's drowning, but if they won't at least grab the edge of it, right, they could just look at it and drown anyways, right? But God, so then God won't magically, like, make it land on their head, I guess. I don't know. You know? So here are the three things. God deals with sin, kind of protects us with, this is the next thing, piece if you want to fill in your blanks. The covenant, the law, and the prophets. We'll get to those in next, in future weeks. The covenant with Abraham, particularly, but also with Noah. And then the law, which is a special category of a covenant. And then the prophets are God's reminder to the people that they're sinning and that they need to straighten out. And again, none of these things ultimately work the way God wants them to, but doesn't mean that they're not good. They are good because God gave them. And if they had been followed, they would have gone a long ways towards dealing with the outcome of the fall. But that's not the reality that we live in. So there's one more thing that God does. And the Apostle Paul kind of talks about this in the reading that Adele read from, where it said that, just as sin enters the world through one man, right?

[30:23] Then righteousness enters the world through another man. Just through one man, all have sinned and all will die. Through one man, all will be given new life and new hope. So there's one more thing that God does. And this is the one that actually works. Because why? Because it depends entirely on God, not on people. Okay. So at the end, the rescue plan, the last thing that God does, is that God gives them a new life. And the rescue plan unfolds like this. And we're going to get to this even further down the line. But this is the preview. The short cliff notes is that God does come back.

[30:58] In a garden, in the evening, in the flesh, limiting himself. And like St. Paul says, he took on flesh and he walked and he talked and he wept and he bled and he hungered and he thirsted and he cried out in pain. And the disobedience of one man was, you know, it was a great thing. Right?

[31:30] Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? God rescues us from sin, but not all the consequences of sin. And you can fill that in if you want to. God rescues us from sin. Yes, he gives us Jesus, but not all the consequences of sin. He gives Adam and Eve some clothing, but it's not enough to save their family from falling apart with murder, right? So there's some help and there's some things that God will not help us with. We have to take the consequences. But God's goal, as we will see, is to try in various ways over the next several weeks to repair the relationship that was broken with him. So we come back to this idea that God in the garden, this little part of Genesis that we kind of pass over, God wants to get back to that spot where he can walk with his creatures in the garden in the cool of the night and say, How was your day? And put his arm around. Can you imagine Eve under here and Adam under here and he's just walking with them? Gently through the garden, talking to them because he loves them and holding them close and embracing them. He wants that again. So God wants to repair relationship with us. Things that were broken. The biggest thing I think that was broken in the fall was not just the commandment, but the relationship with God.

[33:04] So listen, this is the darkest and saddest of all of our sermons. Sorry, but that's okay. I mean, it's just. Kind of like Good Friday. You know, we have to get through Good Friday to get to Easter. So there's a lot of negativity in this one. And that's just how it is because we're talking about the fall of humankind.

[33:27] And I think even it's possible that God took one last walk with Adam and Eve. And he kind of maybe a little bit more of a distance because he was walking them towards the exit to the garden. And there was a change. Right?

[33:46] Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? You have chosen this. You can't be here anymore. I'm going to give you what I can as you go out the door, but you're on your own. And I may never see you like this again in this particular way.

[34:21] And I'm not going to protect you from everything you encounter out there, but I will never leave you either. And this is the hope. God's also going to stay with them in some way or another. You're still my creation. You're still made in my image. Go out into this world and live and love and cry and raise a family and die.

[34:44] And at the end of your life on earth, I'll gather you back to myself and we'll walk together again. So God is saying goodbye for now. You'll come back to me someday. In the meantime, we have a lot of work to do. You have a lot of work to do and we have a lot of work to do to rescue the world from this thing that you have done. So that's the story of the fall. I'm looking forward to next week as we keep moving on. Let's pray.

[35:10] Father, thank you again for your word, this difficult word, but also your desire to be in relationship with us. And ultimately, Lord, we thank you for your son, Jesus Christ, who undid this in so many important ways.