Amen, amen, appreciate that. Turn over to the first book of the Bible, to the book of Genesis. I began a couple weeks ago preaching out of the book of Genesis on Sunday nights, but the Lord has directed me today to preach this morning out of Genesis, the third chapter, if you'll go there. So just a few pages in in the Bible, there's a Bible, should be a Bible in front of you if you don't have one. But we go down to verse number nine for our text I'll read this verse and pray and then of course we'll do a little reading around it to give the context but Genesis 3 and verse number 9 and the Lord God's called unto Adam and said unto him Where art thou the title of my message comes from that question? what Charles Spurgeon said is the first words of God to the first sinners and in the Bible. And it is these words, where art thou? And we're going to let God deal with us this morning. Let's pray together and ask for God's blessing again. Father, You know that we need You. You know, God, this is Your plan, the preaching of Your Word. I pray that from this text that You gave us and recorded for us an event so long ago, Lord, that every sinner would place themselves in the position of hearing this question. That every person here, where art thou? That we might come honestly before us, before you today. And give me words to say as I preach in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Contrary to the popular idea, man is not on his way up. He is a creature who has suffered from a devastating fall. His basic nature, our basic nature, is not good but evil. In all His innermost being, everything in here has been disoriented by sin. The Bible confronts us with this truth from the very beginning of the Bible, and He puts it before us, not only over and over again making us understand that our nature is not good, but gives us the solution that he provides and warns us of the consequences of our sins and the rejection of that provision of salvation. No person can properly understand human nature who fails to take into account the most basic of these laws, or the law of human nature, and that is the law of sin. All sorts of people out here believe they understand nature. They think you have a problem. You go to a psychologist whose ideas are not based on the Bible, and they ignore one issue, and that is the issue that we are sinners. They are behaviorists, they study the behavior of animals and assume that we are drawn by the same instincts, but they fail to take into account the most important law, and that is the law of sin. The chapter before us records man's fall. Sin began in heaven. with the devil, a created being, Lucifer, as the Bible describes in the book of Isaiah chapter 14, that he was called Son of the Morning, one of the archangels of God who rebelled against God. You can read that account for yourself later. By the time sin arrived in the Garden of Eden, it was full grown and mature in its impact. Satan begins his temptation by invading the carcass of a serpent, a snake. You read about it, his subtlety of the serpent in verse number 1. Go back with me to verse number 1. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Satan is a subtle creature. The word subtle means wise. He is the wisest archangel, yet when he fell he became debauched and sinful, but he retained his abilities of wisdom. In other words, he is very evil and wise in his sin. The Bible tells us in the New Testament this way, that we ought to be simple concerning evil and wise unto that which is good. One commentator said that three chapters, this is the third chapter, third chapter and from the beginning of the Bible, the serpent appears for the first time. And three chapters from the end of the Bible in the book of Revelation, he is seen for the last time. This is our enemy, God's enemy. And this being with whom Eve dealt was more than a match for her, except for one thing. She had God's word. Now, however small or short time she had God's word, she had God's word, and God's word is more than a match for this enemy. If you have the Word of God, you have all that you need. All the craft and cunning of the evil one would have availed him nothing had Eve simply responded to every suggestion and statement of Satan with the words, thus saith the Lord. It would have been the answer. And this Satan comes and appeals to Eve in her intellect and has an argument or puts forth his subtle doubting and the avenue of attack comes against her very weapon. And that's the Word of God. Look what it said in the middle of verse number 1 in chapter 3. It says, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden. Now God had put man into this place that He had prepared for him. If you look back at the last chapter, in verse number 15, it says, And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. She had that command, and the devil begins to attack God's Word. He begins this three-fold attack about the doubting God's Word by, first of all, attacking the authorship of God's Word, saying, Yea, hath God said. Did God really say these things? Did this Bible, to you today, the devil will say, did this Bible really come from a God who created all things? The authorship of God's Word was doubted in those statements. Matthew Henry, one great commentator, whose books are good to read, he commented this way, he said, some think that Eve received the command, not through the gate of the eyes, I'm sorry, not immediately from God, but at second hand by her husband, and therefore might the more easily be persuaded to discredit it. Now you understand what I said because my eyes flipped down to a different section of my nose. But the case is, she probably didn't hear that command from God. She probably, she might have gotten it from Adam. And so it was related. So she stood in the same place that you and I stand. Having the word of God coming through the prophets and the apostles, having been recorded for us, and the devil comes along and he tells you, hey, maybe God said this, maybe he didn't. He attacked the authorship of God's Word. Secondly, he attacked the accuracy of God's Word. How do you know that Adam gave it to you? The right way. Maybe it was mixed up in the translation. Maybe it was some kind of problem and he comes and he says in here, Every tree ye shall not eat of. Every tree? That's not exactly what the Lord said. The Lord said you can eat of all of the trees of the garden except for one. But what He's doing, He's setting Eve up saying, God is withholding something from you. He's holding back something good from you. Something that He knows if you have this, you'll gain a special knowledge. God, then lastly, He attacks the acceptability of God's Word. God is somehow not as good as the Bible says God is. God must be a God who's trying to deny you of your rightful gifts, what is rightfully yours. This is something God wants you not to have. Why doesn't God want you to have this? Well, we understand that God put this test in the garden because God wanted us to love Him from our hearts. If there was no way to disobey God, no test at all, then we would never have a chance to love God from our heart because we could not deny ourselves. We have a free will. Man was given a will to choose. It makes us different from any other created being. we have a will. We have the power to choose, to deny God in our lives, to choose to love Him or to choose not to love Him. And in this case, if you look at the name of that tree, as I mentioned last Sunday night, it is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But I think if you emphasize that word, and, I think it puts a perspective for us. This is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They already knew good because they knew God. And they knew God intimately. They knew the righteousness of God. They were spiritually alive. They were interacting with God. God walked with them in the cool of the day. God was their friend. And He's not withholding from them anything good, but rather after you eat this fruit because of disobedience, He said, you'll know good and evil. You'll know good all around you, because even in this natural life, where we are born in this world as sinners with a nature like Adam and Eve had at the end of this story, a nature that is sinful and condemned. Friend, we see the goodness of God all around us, that He is a good God, giving us the things that we need in this world. But yet now, because of Adam's fall, we know good and we know evil. We have a knowledge that is not godly. God's word is not acceptable. And then Adam was coming up afterwards, if you'll see in the commitment commission of this act. And verse number 6, And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. Satan planned to have Eve tempt Adam. Satan never confronted the serpent, I mean Adam. Adam and the serpent never met. And Adam was given the choice of Eve or to deny Eve. His emotions were tried. So the fall of man can be summed up this way. He turned a look, in verse number 6, in when the woman saw. He turned a look into a lust. Turned a desire that he created into a decision. He turned a choice into a chain, the chains of sin. and turned a sinner, then, Eve, into a seducer, a seducer of her own husband. The subtlety of the serpent. Subtlety. Then we have the success of the serpent. I mean, he brought her to the point where after lying to her, he said, yea, hath God said, he said, he reviewed what he, and then misquoted Christ. I'm sorry, Eve misquoted God. But then the devil said, I'm going to appeal to your intellect. Look at verse 5. For God doth know that in the day ye thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. See, Satan, who attempted to put himself above God, has always set false religions seeking after the deification of man. He always wants to do, and he does it two ways. He does it by lifting man up to a place of potential or exact deity. And then he does it by bringing God and his sovereignty down to somewhere in between, all the way down to being a man, to being in the fault. So if God is not that high, man is feasibly going to attain. And if man just had a boost, maybe we could become like what God is. But that's not found anywhere in the scripture. The creatures at the center of God's attention, the center of God's affection, mankind made in His image, granted the will like no other created beings and to have them turn against the command of God, it would bring ruin and it would bring death. It would bring the light of God going out in their lives. Again, Matthew Henry said, Satan knew he could not destroy man except by debauching him. And as soon as they sinned, the light went out. The glory of God departed from their hearts. One author suggested that their state of nakedness mentioned in verse 25 of the last chapter, and then not noticed by man until they were confronted after their sins, makes an illustration that maybe they were clothed in the light of God. As the psalmist said that God is clothed with light, he says, as with a garment. that at the time of their sin, the light went out. Ye shall surely die. A denial that people have said, well, Adam and Eve didn't die that day. They most certainly did die that day. A denial they never made because they looked at themselves and said that the spiritual man, the part of us that can commune with God, that can walk with God, that is not afraid of God, died. It's gone. the light of God, and that would match some of the New Testament where He says, walk in the light. That in God there is no darkness at all. The death of their spirit within them caused the light to be extinguished. and the physical side of their nature was pushed right into the prominence so that we live as natural people, centering upon our physical bodies as all that there is apparently, but yet there's so much of us that died when Adam sinned. They sold their paradise for a knowledge not just of good, they had that, but of evil. And two things immediately resulted. They tried to cover themselves, number one. Secondly, they had to hide from God. Man had neither one of those things were his concerns. If you go down there to verse number seven, and the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. Man says, I've made a mess. I've died. The light has been extinguished. I've died spiritually. I'm separated now from God. And I'm sure they didn't understand how far they were separated until verse 9 comes in. But they said, I've made a mess. I think I can fix it. Hey, pass me that needle and thread and pass me those fig leaves. Let's put together something and cover ourselves because God might show up as He does every day and we are not presentable to God. And so as fallen creatures since this time, mankind seems to find that as their potential solution to sin. Say, I know I'm not with God. I'm not reconciled to God. I don't have a relationship to God. And when I die, I don't know if I'm going to go to God. So that I'm going to sew my religion together. Something of the earth. Something that's not going to make it when the death comes. But I'm going to try. I'm going to put some effort. I'm going to put my good works up there. And I'm going to say, I'm going to clothe myself in my own efforts. But it will not work. Just like their covering was not enough. They also hid from God. I mean, Adam knew this was coming in verse number 8, and they heard the voice of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. The voice of the Lord. Sometime open up your book of Psalm and look up where it talks about the voice of the Lord. It'll shake the mountains. There's great power, it thunders. and the voice of the Lord coming to commune with them as their friend, walking in the midst of the garden, and they could hear. And what did they do? It says, Adam and Eve hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. Why? Because of fear. New Testament says, perfect love casteth out fear. But they had disobeyed God. They were guilty. And now, in fear, they hid themselves from God. And then we come to this very text. Verse number 9, And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou? Those who have sinned, Matthew Henry said, who by sin have gone astray from God, should seriously consider where they are. They are afar off from all good, in the midst of their enemies, in bondage to Satan, and in the high road to utter ruin." The Lord asked this question not because He couldn't find them. God is omnipotent. He's also omniscient. God knew everything. He knew where they were. So how is God asking this question? Charles Spurgeon is a pastor whose sermons I love to read, and he suggests that there are five ways that this phrase could be interpreted. The first one is in an arousing sense. He was trying to awaken us from the vice of sin, which deludes our minds and blinds us and makes us think that we're safe where we are. As if we go in life, we're sinners, and we know, hey, I'm a sinner, but so is everybody else around me. I mean, Eve says Adam sinned, and Adam said, well, Eve sinned. We're in this thing together. I think I'm okay, but then God comes and says, where art thou? So let me ask you that in an arousing sense. Where do you stand before that holy God? Where are you? I know the devil wants our eyes to be blinded. The Bible says in the New Testament, if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost. In whom the God, the small g, God of this world, Satan himself, blindeth the minds of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them. This is where the difference comes in that we think because of religion or because of some kind of association with religious things that we're okay, but God says, I want to pull across those curtains, open up our eyes and ask the question, where art thou to arouse us to our soul's need? If you died today, do you know for sure if you're going to go to heaven? Do you know where you are? in an arousing sense, secondly, maybe to convict of sin. I mean, we have a tendency to explain our sin away, like Adam does, as soon as he's asked. And the Lord said, in verse number 10, read a couple of verses, and He said, I heard thy voice, Adam said, in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and hid myself. And He said, who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree? And in verse number 12, and the man said, the woman thou gavest to be with me. Wives know this, guys have been blaming the women ever since this time. I mean, the man says the woman made me do it, and the woman says the devil made me do it. And in some way, man is really looking at God saying, there's nothing I could have done about this. This is what we are. Now in one sense, that is what we are. We're sinners. We're all guilty before God, but God comes along and he asks that question so you can just see just how far we are from God. Where is man? He is lost. He cannot fellowship with God any longer. He's about to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. He's about to be put in a position where he has to come to God only through the blood, the sacrifice of the blood, the blood of Jesus Christ. And we will not even in this life understand the full understanding of fellowship like Adam did until we go to heaven to be with Christ. Alienated, the Bible says. He wanted us to see how bad our sin was. A third way is maybe the Lord was coming by asking this question because He was bemoaning the loss of their fellowship. As if to say when He said, where art thou? He might have said, how can I give you up? How can I utterly destroy you that your sin deserves? I made you my fellow in the cool of the day. I made the garden for your enjoyment. You were happy once and now you're naked and poor and miserable. My image was on your life and now you have marred that image and corrupted the great gift and now you deserve the wrath of God. But God is sad saying, how can I punish you that I loved? Sometimes we fail to see that our sin has broken the heart of God. We have this image of God that is as if He's waiting around a corner for you to make a mistake and hurt you. But on the other hand, God is a merciful God who sent His only begotten Son. You can't have my sons. I have two of them and you can't have either one. But God gave all of us His only Son. A heart of God broken because of the sin of mankind. Maybe it was to arouse us to our senses. Maybe it was to convince. Maybe it was a bemoaning. But it might also have been said like a seeking voice of God. Where art thou? As if God is on his beginning steps toward Calvary. After all, the Bible says in the New Testament that Christ was crucified before the foundations of the world. that God in His foreknowledge knew everything that was about to happen. In this kind of statement, God is stepping out into the garden on a long journey that will take Him these several thousand years to get to the very cross on Golgotha's hill, where there His purpose was declared in His lifetime here, that Jesus said, I have come to seek and to save that which was lost. Where art thou? He says, Adam said, I am lost! God says, I'm seeking for thee! So that if you're here and you don't know Christ as your Savior, the Savior has stepped out from the galaxies, beyond the galaxies, stepped into our world, clothed Himself with flesh, lived for 30 years without sin, without our nature to sin, but yet they crucified Him, and He sacrificed His life. Because at this point in history, He stepped out to seek after your soul, and you can be reunited to Him today. But there is one devastating way that this is spoken of. Because the Lord offers salvation to all, whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But there are those who all their lives have heard and have said, I will not get saved. And to the rebellious who reject the salvation, He's asking this question, he might be asking it today. Where art thou? To the unsaved man who died last week, God reaches down into the fiery furnace of hell and says, where art thou? There's no hope, there's no way to be rescued once you have gone that far. You need to hear the message today. You need to get salvation. God's way. In the next verses, beginning in verses 14, all the way through, I think, verse 19, we have the record of God sentencing this world. He provides a sentence on the serpent, then on Eve, and then on Adam. You can read these later, but I want to point you to verse number 15. And you'll find the first time that the gospel is ever mentioned in the Bible. Man sinned and a few verses later God reveals that he's already got a plan. Look at verse 15, and I will put enmity between thee, that's the serpent, and the woman, between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. This is the gospel in a nutshell. This is the beginning of it. A lot more is said about the gospel later on, but this is where the promise is made to Adam and Eve that one day there would be a child born and that baby would be the sacrifice and the solution. Oh, he's going to crush the head of the serpent, Satan. And this is a prophecy of Jesus Christ. coming to die for all of us. So I ask you, where are you? If you were hearing the voice of the Lord said, where art thou? Lord, you might say, I'm in such a place that my sins are going to be judged. I say, Lord, I'm in a state when it seems even prayers can never be acceptable to you. Lord, I'm lost. I'm in a state where I can't find the fellowship. I'm guilty. I am gone. Lord, I have sinned beyond hope. God makes a picture here at the end of this chapter. And this picture is a picture of how salvation will take place if you look down at verse number 20. Now, here is a statement of faith. Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. God had just told him that the seed of the woman, the seed of the woman would one day be the solution. Jesus was going to come. And before she has any children, He calls her the mother of all living, saying, God, I confess, I believe in your plan. She's going to conceive and bear a son. In verse number 21, unto Adam also and unto his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothe them. Now what was lost by their sin could never be restored until Christ would come and die for their sins. But there was a covering made. And that covering represents the first killing in the Bible. You can read it. Read these chapters. We don't know how much time has gone on, certainly not that much time between the end of the creation week, because the Lord told them to be fruitful and multiply, and as yet they had no children, so it couldn't have been a long period of time that they dwelt there before the serpent showed up and before their sin. This had to be not so long a time, but if you'll read those passages, nothing had died. They had not seen blood. The closest thing was on creation day number six, when Adam's side was open, but he was in a deep sleep and did not understand. But this world has never seen blood until man has sinned. And the Lord took the skins to cover as a picture. so that the sacrifice of every animal after that pointed to the coming of the Lamb of God. From this point all the way to Calvary again, the Lord is pointing His way. From this book you can read over and over again, He's pointing down the line of history saying, hey, there's salvation and restoration, there's reconciliation, there's regeneration, but it's going to come in the person of My Son, who's the Lamb, who will die on Calvary. You wonder why salvation can save a person from hell and give you heaven? Because it's a substitute. I deserve to die and go to hell, but Jesus took my place. If I accept Jesus and His free gift, His blood applied to my heart, then He can take my sin and I get His righteousness. And that unfair exchange because the Lord didn't deserve to take our sins. We don't deserve to have His righteousness. But that unfair exchange pictured by this lamb that had to die. Could you imagine Him there? Nothing had ever died. They've never seen blood. And here comes this little lamb. And the lamb comes by and maybe they had fed the lamb and they had petted the lamb and the lamb was innocent. And God in some way sheds the blood of that lamb. As the blood pours out on the ground, it's a picture of my sin and my death that I deserve. But it's a picture of the Lamb of God one day, Jesus, whose blood ran down His back from His head, from the beard that was plucked, the blood that ran down the cross, shed blood of Jesus Christ. And by that blood, our righteousness is applied to our hearts. So I finished my message today, not a long message, but a serious one. The covering for us today, the seed of the woman, Jesus, is the blood of Christ. The only way for us to be reconciled to God, you have to be in the blood. You have to be saved. So where art thou? Are you in the blood? The only way to have your sins removed in the blood, where art thou? Doesn't matter what other people think. Who cares what the person next to you thinks? You're gonna die. This is a short life. And when you die, do you know right now that when you die, you're in the blood, that you're saved. And the only way to receive this for yourself is by complete faith in Christ, asking for salvation. Lord, I'm a sinner. I'm lost. I need to be saved. Please come and save me. The gracious God against whom we have sinned calls out to recover your soul this morning, but he asks you, where art thou? Are you his? Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word. Thank you for how this book began and how it was, right from the beginning, trumpeting salvation as soon as we fell. I pray God that you deal with hearts this morning. Heads bowed and eyes closed. Is there anybody here who would say,