Our scripture reading this evening is taken from the book of Genesis and chapter 3. Genesis chapter 3. The first two chapters of Genesis are an account of the creation. The first being very much an overview and the second zooming in on the creation of Adam and Eve, the first human beings. So Genesis chapter 3. Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, has God indeed said you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden. For of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die. Then the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die, for God knows from the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, Where are you? So he said, I heard your voice in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat? And the man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate. And the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this you are cursed more than all cattle, more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. The woman, he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you. Then to Adam, he said, because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, say you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for your sake, in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thaws and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you shall return. And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Also for Adam and his wife the Lord God made tunics of skin and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us to know, good and evil. And now lest he put out his hand and take also the tree of life, and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So he drove out the man and he placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. May God bless the reading of his holy words. Now in these mid-week meetings at the moment we have started this series looking at the Bible's teaching and using as a guide the Baptist Confession of Faith 169. Now of course it's not that we give any authority beyond the Bible to the confession, but rather that the confession is intended to be a summary of biblical doctrine. And there is a certain order to it, so that it begins with the question of how is it that we know anything about God, and we know that by the Scriptures. And then who is the God that the Scriptures teach? then deals with God's decree and creation, God's providence, how God governs the world. So we come to this section on the fall of man. Why is the world the way that it is? Why is the world not very good as it was when God created it? And the answer is human beings. Humanity, I've told the story several times in the open air, of back in the day, the Times had a correspondence on the question, what's wrong with the world? And various philosophers and pundits wrote in with their ideas, this is what's wrong with the world. And eventually G.K. Chesterton, the journalist and apologist, wrote in, and a very simple letter it was too, In answering the question, what's wrong with the world, he said, dear sir, I am. I am. Not meaning, of course, it was him in particular, but the problem is human beings, human sin, that we are not what we ought to be. So that the problem is what people have done. So to read what the confession says, although God created man upright and perfect, and gave him a righteous law which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honour. Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to seduce Eve then by her seducing Adam who without any compulsion did willfully transgress the law of their creation and the command given unto them in eating the forbidden fruit which God was pleased according to his wise and holy counsel to permit having purposely in order to his own glory. We have again that point God made man upright. that human beings were not made sinful and it's a very important thing to emphasize because today we have many people who in various ways want to say well because I have an inclination towards sin then that means that that inclination must have been put there by God and is a good thing you have these various people who say well I was made this way born this way Well, indeed we were born inclined to sin, but that doesn't mean that God then made us as sinners. The Bible is very clear in its account of the creation. Genesis chapter 1 and verse 31, then God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. It was very good that God looked upon the creation and said it was all very good. It was all as it ought to be. That there was in the first creation no death, no sin, no suffering. But God made human beings very good. We see this in Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, and the image of God created him. Male and female he created them. And then we have it zooming in then in Genesis chapter 2. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7. And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being. God created humanity and man is created the Bible says as a special creation not as the end result of a process of evolution, but as a special creation in God's image. And God's image initially involves not just that we are rational beings who reason, who think, who communicate with one another with words, but that man was created in righteousness and uprightness to live unto God. And God created man with a law. That's the way that the Confession puts it. A law, of course, being the law, we may say, of the tree. Genesis chapter 2 verse 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat, but 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. So it was a you shall not. And it's in the sense of a... as our forefathers put it, a positive law, that is to say, it's not simply you shall live according to the way things ought to be, but here is a specific rule that is set forth, this tree that is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So it is spoken of as a righteous law which had been unto life had he kept it and threatened death upon the breach thereof. So God made the first man, Adam, with a law and then of course God forms Eve out of Adam and Eve has been told the law by Adam. And then we find in Genesis chapter 3 in our reading how the serpent and we find later on the serpent is spoken of in terms of the devil, that old serpent, the devil as the Bible puts it. He's called the Old Serpent because he was the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And the serpent comes and the serpent is deceitful, deceiving. And he can't answer the question, has God indeed said Undermining God's Word. Undermining. First of all, asking, has God said? And then, when Eve speaks, well, this is what God has said, and no, it's not that God has said we can't touch any of the trees, it's just this one tree. And the serpent then comes with a denial of God's goodness. God he says, is lying to you. God does not care about you. God knows in the day that you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. God is keeping you back from something good. And that's why we have this description, verse 6, that she saw the tree was good for food, it was attractive, it was pleasant to the eyes, and too desirable to make one wise. Because sin begins in the heart, begins with emotion, that I should do this wrong thing, this thing will be something that will please me, something that will lead to some advantage. And so it is that our first parents fell. And the confession is again very plain here in saying that God was pleased to permit this because what's the alternative? The Bible tells us that God knows the end from the beginning. The alternative is that we end up saying well God didn't know what would happen. But that goes against everything the Bible says about God. So What's going on? Well, it is within God's plan. Again, the devil meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. Because God's providence is always for his own glory and for the good of his people. If it had not been for the fall, then, well, history would have been very different. That's all we can say. Why did God allow this to happen? Yes indeed it is that, well that's absolutely because of course what that means is that because of the fall God is glorified in his justice but also he is glorified in his grace towards sinners who are saved through Christ and he is glorified in his love for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. It is a, and it's important again to emphasise it's a historical event. This is not simply an allegory or a metaphor. The Bible is very clear. Adam and Eve are real people who did real things. Our Lord believed in a literal historical Adam and Eve. And he after all knows better than any of us. But then what does the fall bring about? Well, first of all, our first parents by this sin fell from their original righteousness and communion with God. We see that in Adam hiding. And that question, Adam, where are you? The great Bible commentator, Dr. Gill, was converted through a sermon on this very question. Where are you? And if you look at Dr. Hill's commentary, he goes into this point, the question of course is not because God doesn't know where Adam is, but that Adam needs to know where Adam is, not just physically, but in terms of where he is spiritually, that he has fallen. that he is afraid of God, he has fallen from this communion with God. Because the language here of the Lord, verse 8, the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day suggests that this was normal, that God would regularly come and meet with Adam and Eve. And in this one occasion, Adam and Eve having sinned, they hide from the presence of God. They run away from God. God asks the question, where are you? They fell from their original righteousness and communion with God and we in them And that's a very important point, that this fall doesn't just affect Adam and Eve, and it's not then simply a matter of, well, because Adam and Eve are in the state they are, then everybody starts life disadvantaged in that sense. It's not simply, to use an illustration, it's not simply as though you have a A wealthy man who loses everything and therefore his children don't start with the same advantages he did when he came into that wealth. but rather it is that there is a spiritual loss that we died in him we are spoken of as dead in trespasses and sins that's how Paul puts it in Ephesians chapter 2 and you were dead he says in trespasses and sins and we find this laid out, this doctrine, this teaching of the Fall laid out in Romans for example in Romans chapter 5 that Romans chapter 5 and verse 12 therefore just as through one man sin entered the world and death through sin and thus death spread to all men because all sinned because all sinned now partly this is that same language that we find when The Apostle in Hebrew speaks of Levi having, as it were, paid tithes to Melchizedek because he was in his forefathers' loins, that is, because Abraham paid tithes, therefore Levi is shown to be a lesser priest than Melchizedek. But also that there's... because here we have this point that every human being comes from Adam, including, of course, Eve who was taken out of him. And all sinned, because all were in Adam. And that's the first point, that all have indeed become subject to death. We are dead in sin, Romans 6. And verse 20, when you were slaves to sin, you were free in regard to righteousness, that is, you had no righteousness. you were slaves of sin, and that all were indeed dead in Adam, because Adam fell. And therefore, just as through one man's, sorry, Romans 5.17, if by the one man's offence death reigned through the one, And it's one of these wonderful cases where Paul doesn't finish his sentence. He begins, if, and then he comes back to therefore. So it's verse 12, just as, through one man's sin. And then by verse 17 he's realised that it's been such a long time since he started, he's just as, he needs to start the comparison all over again. if by the one man's offence death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace from the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one Christ Jesus. Therefore as through one man's offence judgment came to all men resulting in condemnation, even so through one man's righteous act the free gift came to all men resulting in justification of life. As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one man's obedience many will be made righteous. And Paul's comparison here tells us this is what Adam has done. But the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, has not just reversed it but has done better. all becoming, again to go back to what the Confession says, all becoming dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and paths of soul and body. And this is what theologians refer to as total depravity. It's a doctrine that is sadly often denied today. I was because last Tuesday they gave a talk to the Staffordshire Welsh Society on Edward Jeffreys and the Bethel movement and I was again amazed to find this Pentecostal man, son of Stephen Jeffery is nephew of George Jeffery, founder of the Ealing Pentecostals and he's doing his confession of faith for the Bethel movement and he says the fall of man are a total depravity. Pentecostal man, total depravity he says. And that was a hundred years ago. Total depravity. And it's not this idea that everyone's as bad as they can be, because that's obviously patently false, but rather that every part of humanity is affected by the Fall. And you were dead in trespasses and sins, Paul says. You were dead A dead person can do no good. A dead person is unresponsive. And the idea with that picture of dead in Chester-in-Sinds is that people, fallen people, are unresponsive to the Gospel. When the Gospel comes to a fallen person, they can't respond. They don't want to respond. They've got no faculty to respond. And what that means, the great importance there is when it comes to evangelism, we understand that we can preach the gospel and that's all we can do. We can present the gospel, we can bring the word to people, but God has to change the heart. He has to regenerate. You must, Jesus says in John chapter 3, you must be born again. people have to be born again. It's not enough. But also what that does, it's not enough just for people to do things. But also what that means is a great freedom when it comes to evangelism. Because one of the great effects of people denying the need to be born again, denying total depravity is that you get these very manipulative methods of evangelism, this idea that we have to bring someone to a decision. And we probably all heard stories of people who were in these mass meetings and they came forward and did something and then the following morning they said, why did I do that? And the worst case I know of, I've mentioned it before, I've mentioned it again, is a Man of Agnew is a good Christian man with the Lord now. I was on holiday and he heard about a church, the place where he was on holiday, where every service someone made a profession of faith. He thought this is wonderful, go along to this service. And the preaching he said, I remember him telling this actually when I was on a mission, mission trip in Chester, preaching to the tourists there in the summer. And this fellow's telling the story, he said, I went to the church and the preaching was not very good. And he said, everyone's a bad day. But at the end of the service, the minister got up and said, and no one's going home until we've had a profession of faith. And then he realized why they have a profession of faith every service, because somebody had to end the hostage situation by coming forward. And that happens if you think that it's about us getting people to Christ. But when we recognise that God does the work, then what we recognise is we simply present the Word. We bring the Word to people. And the Bible speaks again of this imputation that to quote the confession that Adam and Eve being the root and by God's appointment standing in the room instead of all mankind the guilt of the sin was imputed and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation being now conceived in sin and by nature children of wrath the servants of sin the subjects of death and all other miseries spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free, as we saw from Romans. It's because Adam stood in the room and stead of all humanity that Christ can stand in the room and stead of all who believe in him. Adam's sin is imputed to all who are in Adam. In Adam all die. in Christ all are made alive, that is all who are in Christ are made alive. Everybody is by natural generation in Adam, but only by regeneration is anyone in Christ. And it's because one man could bring sin upon all mankind that one man can bring salvation to all who believe on his name. Sin then is a sad reality of human nature now. And the result is, again a very important point, that we think of sin in terms of a principle within humanity. Rather than being a matter of actions, sin as a principle then leads to actions. So they put it this way, from this original corruption whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil to proceed all actual transgressions. So, sin begins as a print of the heart, you were dead in sin. From the sinful heart they proceeds they precede actual acts of sin. So James, for example, James writes speaking of how sin works. James chapter 1 reading from verse 14. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived it gives birth to sin and sin when it is full grown brings forth death. People are drawn away by their own sinful desires he says. Sin is that principle within. That principle that draws people and that leads them to actual sins. People are born in sin and therefore we need to be saved from sin and not just from the consequences of our sins but from that sin within. That is why we need to be born again. Romans chapter 8 verses 7 and 8, because the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God, but you Christians are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. And yet believers have that struggle with remaining sin within us. The corruption of nature, again to quote the Confession, during this life doth remain in those that are regenerated, and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified that has been killed, yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin. And again, it's important to remember that these confessions were written by pastors. They were written by people who cared for people. Because one of the great dangers of denying reality is that you lead to people becoming very depressed and people being oppressed by false teaching, by various forms of Well, first of all, there are two great problems here. The first is perfectionism. Perfectionism says it is possible to completely cease from sin during life. At its worst, it says that only if you've ceased from sin can you say you're a real Christian. And what that leads to then is, well, to give a concrete example, John Wesley, who was a perfectionist of a sort, was also a man who was quite harsh on himself. He was a man who wrote a diary every day, who examined his own heart. and he therefore could never fool himself into thinking that he'd stopped sinning. Well, the result is that there were people around him who were very shallow who said, oh, we don't sin anymore. We don't do anything wrong. And so Wesley falls into this depression. He writes to his brother, Charles, I wonder, was I ever a Christian in the first place? Now, thank God, of course he was, and he dies with that wonderful words, and the best of all is God is with us, because we're not saved by having perfect theology, thank God. We're saved by the work of the Holy Spirit. But perfectionism leads to this depression, on the one hand. Certainly in real Christians it leads to this depression, this feeling, well, what's wrong with me? On the other hand, there's the danger of antinomianism. Antinomianism is a word, it's a Latin phrase, anti, against, and nomos, law. And antinomianism is the idea that if you're a Christian, then it doesn't matter what you do. At its most extreme, you get the idea that that which would be seen in unbelievers is not seen in me because I'm a Christian. And what that can result in is basically people running to extremes of wickedness because they go well I can't sin so anything I do if I do it then it's not a sin. but rather we have here first of all this point that the corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those that are regenerated Romans chapter 7 and verses 13 through 24 you have Paul's experience at the time he says he speaks of what is going on he says reading from verse 18, For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, nothing good dwells. For to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do. But the evil I will not to do, that I practice. If I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. And verse 24 cries out, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? that he feels the corruption within. John Duncan, a great Christian missionary and teacher of the early to middle part of the 19th century, said worse the effect of the teaching of remaining sin is a hammock for hypocrites but it is across four believers. That is to say the believer feels with Paul, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me? And so looks forward, looks forward to what Paul calls the redemption of the body, that is the resurrection from the dead. So Romans 8.23, not only that but we also who have the first fruits of the Spirit even we ourselves groan within ourselves eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body to be delivered from the presence of sin at the last. and also at the point that yet both itself and the first motions thereof are truly and properly sin. So that we don't deceive ourselves and say, oh well, because I'm a Christian then what I do isn't sinful, it's not as bad as it might be. But no, God's people struggle and suffer so Galatians chapter 5 verse 17 for the flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh and these are contrary to one another so that you do not do the things that you wish we have, there is that conflict within, and that conflict within is a feature of the Christian in the present fallen world. Unbelievers have no such conflicts, because unbelievers, the mind is set upon the flesh, they may be, and there is a conscience of course, but not a conflict in the same way. And the Apostle John says, 1st John chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We come back again and again to that glorious fountain open, that fountain open for sin in the blood of Jesus Christ. because he is the great answer to that question, that problem. And so, we see here in the fall of man the question, if you will, to which the gospel is the answer. The problem, what's wrong with the world? And the answer as to what deals with the problem is Christ and his gospel. Fundamentally, it's not a matter of what governments do is not even a matter of church programs, it's a matter of the gospel, what God has done in Jesus Christ, that Christ has died for sinners and therefore in Him we put our trust. Amen.