The following is a production of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. For more information about the seminary, visit us online at gpts.edu. Come to this conference again. It reminds me so much of our own conference at Puritan Reformed and same kind of people, same pathos and it's wonderful to be with Joey and Sissy and so many friends again. Thank you so much. Genesis chapter 3. What a chapter. We take it so for granted, don't we? Do you ever really read Genesis 3. And think about how central this chapter is in all of scripture. Boys and girls and young people, I'm glad to see some of you here tonight. And I like to call this chapter the black, red and white chapter. It's the blackest chapter in the Bible because it talks to us about sin and about our fall in Adam, which is tragic. It's the red chapter in the Bible, because it talks to us about the blood of the Messiah to come, promised in verse 15, typified in the shedding of blood in verse 21, when God made coats of skin for Adam and Eve. And it's the white chapter, the white chapter of hope, because after God says to Adam in verse 19, dying thou shalt die, Adam looks at his wife and he says, Eve, Ahawa, Life! Because he believes in the promise of God. So he makes the first confession of faith. Therefore it's a chapter of great hope. Now understanding Genesis 3 is fundamental as we heard this afternoon about Genesis 2. to our concept of all of what the Bible teaches. It forms our view of our own lives, our own radical depravity, our desperate need for the only Savior, and the nature of our daily experience in this world. And many of the problems we have in our daily Christian experience, in good measure, are because we've forgotten too often the reality of Genesis 3. Somehow, even as Christians, we try to live as if we haven't fallen. And so we expect too much from other people, for example, forgetting that we're all sinners, even though we're saved by grace. And too often we try to live in such a way that we don't see the seriousness of the fall, the enormity of sin, the dastardliness, the spiritual insanity of sinning against God. And so we brush over these profound depths of Genesis 3 far too lightly. So this evening I want to bring to you or preach to you from this chapter, this glorious chapter, in five main points. The first point I'll be pulling from other parts of scripture a bit, but the rest will be focused on Genesis 3. I want to speak to you about the tempter, the temptation, The trouble, the trial, and the triumph. So we're talking tonight about the temptation and the fall. We're going to look at the tempter, the temptation, the trouble, the trial, and the triumph. So where did sin come from? Boys and girls, you know. Sin came from Satan. It came into a beautiful and perfect world where there was a beautiful and perfect man and woman who were living in a flawless marriage, in a flawless covenant with God, blessed of God, and charged with a great task, to keep the garden and to dress it. Sin came into that world. from a serpent, a serpent that was much more than just a mere reptile. Revelation 12 verse 9 says, the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him. So where did Satan come from? Well, he came from heaven, didn't he? The devil and his demons were once holy angels created by the triune God. Exodus or rather Ezekiel 28 tells us that the devil was once one of God's brightest and most beautiful angels, but his heart was lifted up through pride and ambition. Verse 17 says, and he became corrupt. That's hard for us to grasp how that could happen in heaven. We don't have to grasp it. God is above us, but we have to believe it. And then he was cast down out of heaven. And Isaiah speaks about that. Isaiah 14, 12-14. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Thou art cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations. For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High. Now I emphasize those five I wills for a reason, you see, because Satan's original purpose as an unfallen angel was to do God's will, but in pride and ambition and through his own corruption, he now wants to do his will. And he sets his will against God's will and seeks his glory above God's glory. And so the rebellion of heaven happened and Satan is cast out with his angels. Also, the New Testament speaks about this rebellion, doesn't it? 2 Peter 2 verse 4, God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and deliver them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment. And the sixth verse of Jude similarly says, So Satan rebelled against his dependence and subordination as a creature of God. And he tried to un-God God, to dethrone God, to take the place of God. And because he can no longer reach God, because he's out of heaven, he goes particularly for the crown of God's creation, which is you and me. And even more particularly for us when we are true believers. Because Satan hates to see the image of God re-stamped upon a people that has fallen. And if Satan can trip you up, you see, Satan wants you. He wants you, boys and girls. He wants you, teenagers. He wants you, seniors. He wants you, ministers. Satan wants to have you, to sift you as wheat and destroy you and damage the cause of God. Satan hates believers. He particularly hates church leaders and ministers. He hates you because you have potential for the kingdom of God. And so he comes, this tempter comes to tempt and destroy just as he came in Genesis chapter 3. It's deja vu over and over again, thousands of times in our lives. This was the first sin, the original sin in Genesis 3. But all our actual sin is but a flowering of that original iniquity. So that leads me to the second thought. Let's talk a bit about this temptation, this first temptation to sin. Here in Genesis 3, the focus on sin is rebellion against the word God has spoken. Rebellion against the word of God. That's the focal point. of Genesis 3. And that's exactly what Satan aimed to do. In the hearts of Adam and Eve, he knew that if he could get them to rebel against the Word of God, the will of God, spoken by the mouth of God, he could destroy their joy and interrupt the peace of this world. How did he do it? Well, actually, if you follow with me, if you keep your Bibles open and look, I think we'll find a four-step process here that is helpful to understand Satan's devices. The first is doubting God's word. Satan wants us to doubt God's word. Verse one, 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 really said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? hath God said." In other words, did God really say that? He's calling into question the trustworthiness of God's Word. At the very beginning of his attack, you see, on Eve's mind and heart, he's insinuating that God's Word is subject to God's, no, to man's judgment. That we could take the place of God and determine whether God's Word is fitting, yes or no. Which is exactly what Satan himself did, of course, in heaven, and he got cast out for it. And we need to learn from this what a perilous thing it is when we allow Satan to move us, even the smallest bit, to question God's Word and its integrity, because that's exactly how he gets a foothold in our minds still today. And that's why the battles waged in the church so often focus upon the authority of Holy Scripture, the authority of God's Word, the whole area of the supremacy of that Word, the sufficiency of that Word, the infallibility of that Word, the inerrancy of that Word is cardinal to our spiritual well-being. So still today, Satan's coming in our lives in all kinds of ways, isn't he? More ways than we know with this question. Did God indeed say? Really his attack here is on the goodness and credibility of God. Did God prohibit you eating from any tree? It's kind of a touch of cynicism here. Is this something you can really believe that God would say? The implication is, Eve, God's overly restrictive, don't you understand? God must be distant from you. He must be uncaring about you to give you such a strict command. And I find it fascinating that throughout all the rest of Genesis 2 and 3, God calls himself, or Moses calls him rather, the Lord God. The Yahweh name combined with the Elohim, the Almighty God, the intimate God, the covenant-keeping God. But Satan just comes and drops that name Lord, that personal name. It just says God. Has God said? It doesn't say the Lord God said. He's trying to make God. He's insinuating that God is just almighty, perhaps, but distant. And He won't care. He won't be personal. When you encounter this kind of thing in your own life, when you get that feeling stirring up inside of you, that God won't hear you, or God is far away from you, Though He's enthroned in our flesh at the right hand of the Father in heaven, that thought comes from the bottom of hell. It comes from Satan. Banish it from your mind. God is near at hand. He's a transcendent, but He's also an intimate God. He's the Lord God. And the only way to answer Satan in this area is to confront temptation head on the way Jesus did. It is written, it is written, it is written. And when he comes this way, you should say, it is written, Satan, that the God of the heavens is my Yahweh, my intimate covenant-keeping God, and he won't forsake the work of his own hands. And he has promised me, I will never, no, never, no, never forsake you. Don't let Satan make you doubt God's word. Secondly, Satan distorts God's word. Distorts God's word. Look at verses 2 and 3. And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die. You see, already the evil one has begun to produce in Eve's mind a distortion. of the Word of God. Actually, Eve misquotes God in this one statement in three minor ways at first sight, but really significant ways. First, she disparages her privileges by misquoting the terms of God's provision. Notice what she says in verse 16, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But God said, the Lord commanded, Lord God commanded the man saying of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. Now technically Eve's statement is accurate here, but she fails to mention how lavish and how generous God's provision is. And she fails also to mention that God is the giver. You notice God isn't in that. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. She drops out God and she drops out that wonderful word freely. I want to press this home upon you a moment. You see, there's no defense against Satan more effective than a heart that is overwhelmed by the bounty and lavishness of God's gracious provision. And there's no heart correspondingly so open to Satan's wiles than one possessed by a grumbling, ungrateful, murmuring spirit. just as a whole generation of Israelites destroyed their relationship with God by murmuring against Him. So today, if you're possessed by a bitter and negative spirit, and you don't see the lavishness of God's superabounding grace in your life, you've left the door wide open for Satan. And we do that far too often. We complain far too easily. Actually, we always get better than we deserve. I was in the hospital some time ago and stepped on the elevator with a lady in floor one. We were going up to floor seven and I thought, well, I've got maybe a minute to try to evangelize or say something. And so I asked her about the weather and she said, yeah, good weather. I said, it's a good thing we're not in charge of the weather. She said, that's right. God's in charge of the weather. And I said, yeah, it's better than we deserve. She said, you got that right. She said, my mama always told me Anything above ground is the mercy of God. Wow, she's evangelizing me. But you see, that's it. If we really understood our fall and what we deserve as sinners every day, I don't deserve to live today. Do you? What in the world are we doing complaining when God gives us thousands and thousands of gifts both in special grace and common grace to enjoy? Why don't we say He freely lavishes all these things upon us and we praise Him for it. When I was a young boy, my mother was very optimistic. She always had this saying, It's not so bad. It's not so bad. get frustrated sometimes because I wanted her to feel sorry for me, of course. And she'd say, oh, it's not bad. It could be worse. It could be worse, she'd say. I said, well, you can say that about everything. It could be worse. She said, that's right. It could be worse. because of what we deserve. You see, at my very best, most religious, most godly, most pious moment, in my most devout worship of God, I don't treat God as well as He treats me when He brings me through the worst affliction, because He does everything for my good, and He loves me spotlessly. And I am always sinning, because my love is never perfect towards Him. Well, secondly, Eve not only belittles God's generosity here, but she also overstates God's restrictions by misquoting the divine prohibition. She says, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it. Where'd you get that, Eve? It's not there. She exaggerates God's restrictions. That's another favorite device of Satan, by the way, a subtle one. We minimize God's goodness, which he rejoices in, and then we magnify his prohibitions, which he also rejoices in. And as a result, we begin to believe that somehow God's commandments are a grievous and heavy burden when actually his yoke is easy and his burden is light. And then thirdly, Eve misquotes the divine penalty for disobedience. Her words are, lest ye die. But God's words in Genesis 2.17 were, for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. You see, the text is emphatic. Actually, in Hebrew, it's dying thou shalt die. So Eve's statement seems to allow the possibility that you could die, but you don't absolutely have to die. And God said, you absolutely will die. There's absolute certainty here. So there you have it. You see, it seems like she's given a good report, but actually, when she cites God's prohibitions to Satan, she exaggerates them. When she cites the penalty, she understates it. In every way, the tempter is leading her to distort the Word of God. And that's why it's so important that we know the Word well and that we respond to it in our own consciences with integrity. and ask God that we might hide his word in our heart, that we may not distort it. When we distort it, we do so at our spiritual peril in our own Christian pilgrimage. But thirdly, Satan goes on and works on this whole area of denial, denying God's word. Verses four and five, you shall not surely die, he says. For God doth know that in a day either of, then your eyes shall be open. You shall be as God, knowing good and evil. You see, the Lord said, thou shalt surely die. Satan says, you shall not surely die. See, now Satan's getting bolder. That's what he does when he tempts us. He goes from step to step. And he says, believe me, rather than believing God. And he substitutes himself for God. He's actually taking the role of God here, as if he's got the authority. And Adam and Eve fall for it. That's a tragedy. You see, Jesus tells us that Satan is now the ruler of this world, and fallen men follow the devil's ways as children walk in the steps of a father. John 8, 44. Notice that the very first truth of revelation that Satan denies is the truth of divine judgment. You shall not surely die. In other words, he says, you can sin with impunity and get away with it. You can go ahead and disobey God. It's not that serious. Nothing will happen. It will be all right in the end. And he says that all the time, doesn't he? Even to Christians? You bet to Christians. He takes a different route with us. What he does with us is he goes like that. With the world, he says, don't worry about God. God would never send a person like you to hell. You're pretty decent. You're a little better than the neighbor down the road. But with us, we who are aware of our sin, we who are saved by free grace, he looks at us and he says, well, you know, just a little sin there. Don't worry about it. God will forgive you. You believe in grace. Where sin abounds, grace... Yeah. Satan will be happy to make us an antinomian. And that's what's happening all over America today. in millions of so-called Christian souls. They're embracing antinomian principles, and we and I, you and I, are susceptible to it as well, my friend. We are quick, under satanic influence, to turn free grace into cheap grace by denying the seriousness of sin, also in our lives as believers. And then the devil also lies about who we are as men and women. He says that God was holding them back from truly being like him, blatantly ignoring the fact that they were already made in the beautiful image of God and were as like him as they could possibly be, being mere men. You see, Satan said that they needed to know and experience something outside of God's will, something forbidden by God, in order to become truly wise and to become God? I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all, does it? And yet that's how he tempts us today. He says, don't let God's rules restrict you. He comes to you, you teenagers, and he says, you need to taste the pleasures I offer you. But really, he's trying to dehumanize you. What you're really called to be is a human created in the image of God. He's trying to degrade you from your high and lofty calling as God's image bearer. And so when Adam and Eve did eat, they tasted a new kind of knowledge, to be sure. The knowledge of experiencing sin and all its deadly poison. It didn't make them wise, and it certainly didn't make them more like God. It made them a lot less like God. And then finally, Satan defies God's word, verse 6. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that was pleasant to the eyes and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also to her husband with her and he did eat. You see, he challenged Eve to defy the very word of God. of God. And Eve sees. You know how John Bunyan says, usually temptation comes through eye-gate or ear-gate. And here, Satan is doing a double duty. He's coming through eye-gate. He's coming through ear-gate. He shows Eve that beautiful fruit in that forbidden tree. And he clouds over her eyes with his lies. And her natural desires, as it were, turn into deceitful lusts. And then she and then Adam break God's commandment and they defy, they defy the Word of God. And Satan is successful in producing in them moral rebellion against the will of God to degrade and to destroy, just like he tries to do with us today. And you know how John has that triple analysis of the love of the world in 1 John 2, 16? Well, Eve fills it out, lives it out step by step right here. She believed the tree was good for food, stimulating the lust of the flesh. to gratify her bodies, her body at all costs. She saw that it was pleasant to the eyes, stirring the lust of the eyes to seize beautiful, desirable things and make them her own. And she thought it was a treat to be desired to make one wise. So she viewed it with a selfish ambition of the pride of life. This is worldliness. Worldliness is anti-God. It's rebellion against God. It's defiance against God's word. Oh, may God save us from this dastardly thing we call worldliness. So in a word, Eve and Adam consenting, and we and Adam chose to make ourselves into gods and to make the rest of creation into idols. That's the goal, that we become the center and not God. We become supreme and not God. And that's the philosophy of the world today, just living out the fallen human nature. I still remember in college seeing a sign in the bookstore of a painting. It was a picture of the earth, and there was a little guy on top of the earth. He couldn't have been more than a sixteenth inch tall. And there's a little tiny bubble out of his mouth that said, I am the center of this world. You realize how small you are? When's the last time you've flown and you look down from 30,000 feet? We are just a drop in the bucket. All the inhabitants of the earth together are a drop in the bucket compared to the greatness of our God. And so the hinge upon which all of this in verses 1 through 6 turns is that we have exchanged in our fall God's authoritative word for the wisdom of human rebellion. And that has made us doubt God's Word, distort God's Word, deny God's Word, and defy God's Word. And therefore, the way to fight all these things now in our falling condition is to do the opposite, to esteem God's Word, to treasure God's Word, to submit to God's Word as our rule of faith, worship, and obedience. What kind of relationship do you have with the Word of God? When's the last time you read the Bible and you actually read something that convicted you and you denied yourself and you went out and you did the opposite of what you're doing? When's the last time the Bible concretely changed your walk of life and transformed you? Are you letting the Bible shape you? Are you believing God's Word? Are you walking in the ways of God? Let's look at the third thought, the trouble. As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, they were in all kinds of trouble. Bitter, bitter, bitter trouble. What kind of trouble? Well, several kinds. Let me give them to you. First, bitter corruption. Bitter corruption. Our fall was an atrocity. It is high treason against the greatest, most loving, most beautiful, most worthy, most honorable being in the universe. I always get upset inside when I hear people say, oh well, Adam just ate a piece of fruit. It wasn't just a piece of fruit. It was an act of rebellion. Adam knew God had strictly forbidden the disobedience this disobedience upon punishment of death. This is premeditated intentional self-murder. But he also knew he was in a covenant relationship and the human posterity rested upon it. Adam was a great murderer of the whole human race. Sometimes we say, well, if God can save Manasseh, He can save anyone. If He can save Paul, the chief of sinners, He can save everyone. I say, if He can save Adam, He can save anyone. This is a huge sin. Adam also knew that that tree represented the tree of God's authority. And that if he ate of that tree, he would be calling God a liar and saying, I will not die, when God said you will die. And worst of all, Adam knew. Adam knew. that when he would eat of that tree, he would be severing himself from a perfect, loving relationship with his God, with his Lord God. What a sin! To walk openly into that sin when God gave him everything he needed to stand. And knowing too that he would be filled with corruption. And that's what happened. The moment he sinned, Corruption just rushed in into every faculty of His being. So that from that day forward, no one by nature could ever say that they're not sinful in their mind, in their conscience, in their soul, in their will, in their affections. Sin rushed into every part of man. This is bitter corruption. Horrible filth. Sin against every one of the Ten Commandments. Thomas Boston has a wonderful part. Dr. Vendotto is going to be talking about Thomas Boston's human nature in his fourfold state, I notice, tomorrow. Well, Boston has a section in there where he shows how Adam's sin is a breaking of all ten commandments. Nothing, nothing is left undone. Actually, God used that in my life, that section of Boston, to convict me of my own original sin. Up to that moment, I was under conviction, and I actually thought, if I could just get a little better, if I could just try to be as holy as the angels in heaven, maybe I could get a foothold with God. And God smote me down with that section of Boston. And I saw, I saw vividly that There's not a single moment of my life by nature in which I love God above all. So I'm always sitting against the first table of the law. There's not a single moment in my life that I really love my neighbors myself. I'm sitting against the second table of the law and I can't change it. I need a Savior from outside of me to change my heart. And you do too. If you're unconverted sitting here yet tonight. You need this Savior to change you. Every tick of the clock, as Spurgeon said, every tick, tick, tick, tick. I'm sinning, sinning, sinning, sinning, and I don't love God. I don't love my neighbor. 60 times a minute, 3,600 times an hour, 3 million times every year. What sinners we are. Isn't it amazing that God suffers us? I was converted when I was 14 years old. I remember people saying to me in our church at least, oh wow, that's wonderful, you're so young. I go, young? I threw 14 years of my life to the devil. Don't do that boys and girls. Seek the Lord now. Call upon Him now. Repent now. Believe the gospel now. Don't waste another day of your life. Bitter corruption. But also bitter shame, secondly. Genesis 2.25 says, they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. You see, that's not just a statement of intimacy, that's a statement of integrity. But as soon, the very moment they sinned, they realized their nakedness, and they were ashamed. And they looked for clothing, how to cover themselves with something, Before, they're unashamed and free, and now they're bound. They sewed fig leaves, verse 7, together and made themselves coverings or aprons. You see, Satan had said, if you eat of this fruit, your eyes will be opened. But what a sad, defiling knowledge sin brought to them. It robbed them of their innocency. It blinded them. to the wrath of their God against iniquity. God was not trying to keep them ignorant. He was protecting them from an experiential knowledge of sin that dulls and deadens your knowledge of everything that is good. And that's what happens when you sin still as a believer, doesn't it? Your spiritual appetite gets weakened. There's a deadness that comes over you, a dullness. Sin spoils your ability to truly value and appreciate real life. It reduces your sensitivity to beauty and joy, and it brings hardness and bitterness and shame into your soul. Sin robs us of the full appreciation of the beauty of God's creation. It's like a poet said, heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green. Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen. Did you experience that too? Like I did that when you found liberty in Christ, it's like the world around you is more colorful. Everything's more beautiful. Everything's more peaceful. Sin blinds us. It doesn't open our eyes. Adam and Eve became aware of their shame. They try to cover themselves with fig leaves. Hide from almighty God with fig leaves. Hopeless. Hopeless. The fig leaves are going to wither and die and fall away and expose your shame once again. And yet, we always do that, don't we? We try to reach for the nearest thing to try to cover ourselves. Even as Christians, when we fall into sin, the first thing we should do, we should just run to God and weep and cry out, have mercy upon me, God, and forgive me. Don't run from Him. Never run from Him. It's the worst thing you can do. I came home from work one day, this was maybe 15 years ago, my son was quite young and my wife was a bit upset with him. She was telling me what he did that day and it wasn't good. So at the supper table I'm thinking, okay, what shall I do? How shall I punish him? How shall I talk to him? So I was a little extra quiet. I think he picked up the vibes. All of a sudden, there were arms around my neck from behind. And he was crying and the tears were going down inside my shirt sleeve and, Daddy, Daddy, I sinned today. Will you forgive me? Oh, my punishment changed a great measure. Yes, there were still consequences, but it was very different. You see, when you run from God, you just hurt yourself. and you hurt your relationship with God. But you run to Him. He receives you back. But Adam and Eve, they run from Him. And it lives in our hearts. It does. We do it all the time. You can't go quite with the freedom of prayer after you sing, can you? So you hold back. When really you should pray all the more and just pour out your heart with tears and ask for forgiveness. Sometimes we reach for things. You teenagers do that too. Everyone else is doing it. It's okay. You reach for that. It's a fig leaf. You try to cover yourself up. Or you say, well, I'll try to cover myself up with external works of religion. Maybe with coming to the conference. Maybe some of you are trying to cover yourself up by coming to the conference. I don't know. We tend to cover ourselves up with religious works and external things. Sometimes we assume that time cancels sin somehow. I always shudder when I hear Christians talk about how wild they were when they were young, and they do it with a smile on their face. Sin is never funny. Just because it happened 40 years ago doesn't make it any less sinful. You know, to God, a thousand years are as one day. That sin needs to be washed in the blood of Christ. We must never speak lightly about sin, even past sin. There's only one way to cover the shame of our sins. It's not our fig leaves. It's the white-robed righteousness of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul says in Romans 4, even as David also describes the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputes righteousness without words, saying, blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, whose sins are covered. And then there's bitter alienation. Alienation. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but there was alienation on four levels. As soon as Adam sinned, there was alienation within himself. He was separated from his real self. How did he know who this new Adam was? And he felt distant from himself. It was strange for him, no doubt, to not feel close to God and not be able to feel at peace with himself. Internal alienation. There was alienation with his wife. There was instant tension. He blames her right away, doesn't he? The woman thou gavest to me. This marriage nearly fell apart. And there's alienation even with the environment. God cursed the ground. But most of all, there's alienation between man and God. Adam, where are you? There's distance now. How bitter alienation is. What a tragedy the fall is. God comes though. That's the good news. God comes. He comes. He comes asking questions. He comes in an amazing way. And he responds to Adam, and he pulls him out behind that big leaf covering, and he exposes it, and he dialogues with him. But oh, the alienation here. She gave me up the tree. This is the woman you loved, Adam. This is the woman you said was made for you. And now, he's ready to kill her. And I mean that literally, because he knew that the day you eat thereof, You shall die." And now he's saying, Lord, not me, Eve. He's saying, self-preservation. Take her, Lord. It's a tragedy. And then when God hones in on him, he dares to turn on God. And he says, the woman thou gavest to be with me, anybody's fault but his own. And then he kind of says meekly at the very end, almost like a parenthesis. Oh yeah, and I did eat. You recognize that at all? It's all of us. All of us. We're all good at self-justifying, blaming others. This man, once the noble prince of this world, has been reduced to a coward. He's a coward now and he blames others for his sin. He even blames God. And so alienation means expulsion. He has to go from the garden. Your iniquities have separated between you and your God. Your sins have hit his face from you. If we're not in Christ, there's no way to avoid alienation. And then finally there was bitter death. Bitter death. The day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." You know, death is an amazing thing. Death is...well, there's nothing like death, is there? You know, we have our definition of death. We've all said this. We preachers have probably all preached this. Death is really best defined, we say, in terms of separation. Spiritual death is separation of the soul from God. Physical death is a separation of the body from the soul. Eternal death is a separation of soul and body from God forever. Well, that's all true, but death is better felt than tellt. I remember when my son was 18 months old, We went to a funeral home and we were by the casket. I didn't know whether I should lift him up or just let him stay down. I thought, well, maybe I better not. I thought, no, you know what? He's got to understand what life and death are about. So I lifted him up. I didn't think he'd say anything or feel anything, but he could hardly talk yet, maybe a few words. And I lifted him up and he took one look in that casket and his body just stiffened. He felt death. Death is separating. Death separates. This is a very real thing. The day thou eatest, thou shalt die. The day Adam ate, there was a separation. Spiritual death. And that very day he ate, his physical death began. He still lived a long time in our reckoning. But that day he began to die. Dying thou shalt die. That's what began to happen, also physically. And if God hadn't intervened, he would have died eternally. You see, we're fools not to listen to God's warnings against sin. And then, fourthly, there's the trial. The trial is, first of all, confrontation with God. Fallen man cannot hide from God. He comes asking questions. He came to Adam and Eve and Satan in the garden, and he'll come back to us on the day of judgment. You can never, never escape God. Temporarily, you think you can. But you know what? He's the inescapable. And he'll have the final word on the day of judgment. And every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess he's Lord. Confrontation with God is inevitable because He is Lord and He will come back. He's covenant keeping Lord. He'll come back at the appointed time and He'll ask what we did with all the covenant mercies He expended upon us. But also confrontation with God is inevitable because He's good. He's coming in judgment, He's Lord, but He's also good. And you can never escape a good God, a God who's blessed you, a God to whom you owe more than you can ever repay. My dad used to always say to us kids, we heard it a thousand times as kids, now remember children, you can never repay your mother, your whole life for everything she's done for you. That's true. How can you ever repay a mother for everything she's ever done for you? How can you repay your God? For everything he's done, for every blink of the eye you owe to him. Every finger you have in your hands you owe to him. Every thought in your mind you owe to him. You owe your time to him. You owe your eternity to him. You owe your life to him. He comes. He comes to speak with us. He comes to confront, and he comes to condemn sin. He comes to the serpent. He says, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed. He comes to Eve. He says to the serpent, you've gone your belly. For the rest of your life, you'll eat dust. Eating dust, actually, in the Bible is a metaphor used several places for the humiliation and defeat of an enemy. God is saying, I'm going to defeat you, Satan. People always debate whether The snake was standing and then went on his belly later. It's irrelevant. The main thing is God was getting the victory over Satan. Satan was eating dust. It's a symbol of humiliation and defeat. The seed of the woman is going to take on the seed of the serpent and gain the victory. The noble angel that once was a heavenly prince would have his face rubbed in the dirt by the victory of Christ and his people. And so the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly, Romans 16 says. And then God turns to Eve and pronounces sentence upon her. Her sins bring great sorrow in two areas of her life where she gets her greatest fulfillment, in marriage and in motherhood. Relating to her husband will not be a partnership of total cooperation and intimacy, but sometimes it will be a power struggle. Burying children will no longer be pure delight, but difficult, painful, dangerous for mother and child. And the parallel between Genesis 3.16 and 4.7 in the Hebrew text implies that the woman will now desire to conquer and master her husband at times, but he'll continue to exercise authority over her. He'll give them different roles. He created Adam first, speaks the covenant to him alone. The woman is a helper suitable for him. She won't always appreciate that. You see in paradise, the husband's authority and the wife's submission were freely given and gladly received. But sin has turned the best and closest relationship into the battle of the sexes. And then God turns to Adam. Called to work the earth and to subdue it. Adam's labors would now be a desperate struggle to survive. Creation would wage war against him. Thorns and thistles would spring up. God made man to rule as king in the earth and now cursed is the ground for thy sake. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes are the voice of God declaring our tragic fall in Adam, our alienation from the creation and the creator. But in the midst of this blackest of chapters, God offers this red and white hope, the blood of a coming Redeemer. That's my last thought, the triumph of divine grace. It seems after all this, doesn't it, that Satan has won a major victory. The devil himself, yes, fell under God's condemnation, but he did succeed, didn't he, in destroying God's prized possession, the living image bearers of God. But no, he didn't even succeed in that because God comes and intervenes also on behalf of Adam and Eve, gives them the promise of redemption, the famous mother's promise, the protovangelium. I will put enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, thou shall bruise his heel. God comes and the first word in Hebrew is enmity. What? God comes and pronounces enmity? Isn't there enough enmity in the world right now? But this is good enmity, enmity between you and Satan. Adam and Eve stirred up enmity, but it was bad enmity. It was enmity against God and enmity against each other. But God comes and brings enmity where it should be, against Satan. And God comes, speaks about two seeds. Seed means offspring or children, as you know. And as Genesis 4 makes clear, some of mankind will continue to live as the seed of the serpent, following Satan as their spiritual father and head. John calls them the children of the devil, and he uses Cain as an example of them and their evil ways. But God will give another seed through Abel and Seth and ultimately culminate in Jesus Christ himself. And in Christ, the battle will be decisively fought and won And as Christ dies on the cross, his heel, as it were, will crush the head of Satan, even as Satan is biting at the heel of Christ. And in death, he will destroy him who has the power of death. That's why John Owen titled his book, The Death of Death, In the Death of Christ. Oh, this wonderful promise of redemption. And then it's in the singular. The seed, the coming one, the coming Messiah, the one seed that will be the head of the seed of a multitude no man can number. He will gain the victory. And so the second Adam comes. He comes to a garden. He comes to a garden of Gethsemane. The first Adam sins in the garden. The second Adam bears sin in the garden. The first Adam is surrounded with glory and beauty and refuses to obey. The second Adam is surrounded with bitterness and sorrows and the Garden of Gethsemane but is obedient to death. The first Adam is tempted by Satan and falls. The second Adam is tempted by all the forces of hell and does not fall. The first Adam's hands reach out to grasp sin. The second Adam gives out his hands voluntarily to pay for sin. The first Adam is guilty, arrested by God in the cool of the day. The second Adam is innocent, arrested by man in the middle of the night. The first Adam hides himself after fleeing. The second Adam reveals himself after walking into moonlight. The first Adam is driven out of the garden, expelled from the first temple, the garden of Eden, where God dwells. The second Adam is willingly led out of the garden so room may be made for sinners in the garden and temple of heaven where God dwells forever. Oh, what a glorious Savior who undid everything that 1 Adam has undone so that we may have the promise of redemption in the seed. And when Adam hears that, even though he hears four more verses of punishment behind it, he turns to Eve and he says, Life! It's the promise of redemption. the blood, the red, and the promise of hope, the white, life. You will bear children of life. You will bear the seed. What a glorious thing this is. No, the firstborn son Cain wasn't the Savior as they thought he would be. God's timing is always best. But in that word, Eve, in that word, life, we see hope with God. We see hope by faith, believing the promise. We see hope restored in the marriage. Adam is close again to his wife, Eve, through the promise of the gospel. He reaffirms his love for her. He repents of his hateful blaming of her. He must have taken responsibility for his actions in that very moment. because He turns to her with hope and He calls her Eve. And then God covers their shame in verse 21 with the skins of animals requiring to give up the first blood that's been shed, pointing to the seed of the woman to come, pointing to the bloody way of all the Old Testament sacrifices that would culminate on Golgotha's cross. Well, let me conclude by saying to you The fall of man, the temptation and the fall of man are the most important historical facts that you can possibly imagine. Tell me that this is all fable. Tell me this is all allegory. Tell me this is all pictorial. Tell me this is all symbolic. And you lose, as we heard this afternoon, something very precious. because you lose the parallel account as well of the seed of the woman who comes to undo all of this. But also, when we look at a world perplexed by sin and suffering, so many consequences of sin, we need to understand from the fall that we're prone to ask the wrong questions. See, the world today is asking, because it doesn't take into account the fall, why do bad things happen to good people? But the real question is, why do good things happen to bad people? We reduce the gospel. too easily to a spiritual band-aid, cheap, shallow grace which men put easily on and take as easily off. And we need a robust view of the glorious, sovereign, holy God whose judgments are in all the earth, but whose love is simply astounding, and whose grace comes to us in Christ with all the power and all the merit that sinners need when they believe in Christ alone to be justified in His sight. The enormity of sin and the enormity of grace ride in tandem with each other. Generally speaking, the more you see the tragedy of your fall, the more beauty and fullness you will see in the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, I want to close with a couple of illustrations. There was a missionary once who sat down with a native and he said, we've got to write a track. We've got to write a track that explains in picture form the gospel. So he said, the track will have two cliffs. And there'll be a separation between the cliffs, but we're going to make a cross, shape of a cross that goes over the two cliffs. And then we'll get a picture of a man walking across the cross. And that's a picture of the gospel. And the native said, no, no, no. I've got a better picture, I think. And he said this, let's make a picture of a garden with a wall around the garden. And let's have in the first little picture a man saying to his son, son you can go anywhere in this garden you want but just don't climb on the wall. This garden is yours and I want you to enjoy it. But one day the boy did climb on the wall and sure enough he fell. And as he fell outside the garden he realized that the wall had been placed right on the edge of a terrible chasm and he tumbled down the rocks Scraped up badly bruised laying as it were seemingly dead on the bottom the rocks making him bleed yet Barely conscious. He lay there unable to move full of broken bones And then the native said Then we have to picture the father coming to that wall looking over the wall down the ravine at his son And what did he do? Did he say, I told you not to do this? No. What will have him say is my son, I'm on my way to help you. The father went down the rocks, sliding down into the ravine, getting bruised, cut up by the sharp rocks. And so Christ As the Father came underneath the boy to pick him up and lift him up and climb back up, so Christ puts his loving arms around sinners and carries us back gently up the cliff. He was bruised for our iniquities. He was wounded for our transgressions. He brings us back to a heavenly paradise. The missionary said, Your illustrations are better. You see, salvation is not you walking across a cross to Jesus, half you, half God. Salvation is all of Christ. We've fallen. It's all of grace. So I ask you two questions in closing. First, where are thou? Where are you right now, tonight? Where are you spiritually? Is there anything you're hiding from God? Any sin you're not willing to put to death? Any fig leaves you're covering up with? And then you wonder, don't we? We still wonder, why this separation from God? Why not this intimacy of a former day? My friend, you need to go back to God. You need to seek His face afresh, or maybe you need to seek His face the first time. Stop that mad rush of your life. Consider your ways and repent, return, and believe the gospel. You know, there was once a northern highland shepherd boy and he bedded down his sheep one night and where the train normally came on a viaduct between two cliffs, That night there was a ferocious storm so bad that the train track was broken and was laying in the valley in the morning. The viaduct broke and the boy ran up the embankment in the morning in time to stop the train. And he got to the track and waved to the conductor to stop and the conductor just waved him away and the boy threw his body across the track and the conductor slammed on his brakes and ran over the boy and stopped just in time. People were sleeping on the train. They jumped out. They ran to the front. They looked down into the valley and they saw. They looked at the boy, the mangled remains of the shepherd boy. It was very quiet. Nobody said a word. And finally, one old man spoke. He said, that boy there, that boy there, he saved my life. And you see, my friend, if you're not in Christ, you need to stop that train before you go down into the abyss, the train of your life. And don't rest until you look down into the abyss at what you deserve and you look at the cross and you repent and you believe and you say, that God man there, he saved my life. But finally, if you're a child of God, I ask you in closing tonight, where are you? Where are you in your walk with God? Are you serving Him out of gratitude or are you settling for kind of a mediocre Christianity? Are you realizing the enormity of your sin and the enormity of grace so that you in turn respond with your whole life to serve Him and even as you do say, but I'm an unprofitable servant, There was once an English nobleman. He was going through New Orleans on his way back to England. He had made millions more in an 1850s California gold rush. And he went to the infamous slave trading blocks, as so many tourists did in that day, saw a beautiful young African woman being sold, and two guys in the back of a crowd vying with one another what they'd do to her if they got her and trying to outbid each other. And the Englishman was incensed. And he got the auctioneer's attention. He said, I'll give twice the amount anyone will ever give for the price of this slave. The auctioneer said, do you really have that money? No one's ever given that much for a slave. And he pulled the bills out of his pocket and waved them and the auctioneer said, sold. And he came up front and he took the young woman down from the stand and she spit him in the face and he wiped the spit away. And he took her down into a downtown office, got some papers from some guy behind a counter and signed them and he handed them to her. He said, these are your manumission papers. She spit him in the face and he wiped the spit away again. He said, don't you understand you're free? And she stared at him and then she just collapsed at his feet. She began to weep and weep. Finally, she said to him, do you mean to tell me that you pay twice the amount anyone has ever paid for the price of a slave just to set me free? He said, yes. She began to weep some more. And finally she said, Sir, I have just one favor to ask you. Can I be your slave forever? That's what a Christian wants to be. Christ doulos. He's such a wonderful Savior. We spit Him in the face with our sins so many times, but He wipes them away. He forgives us and he embraces us and he gives the infinite price, not twice, but the infinite price. So that we learn to say, bore my ear to the doorposts and let me say to all passersby, I want to serve my master forever. That is the ultimate answer to the fall because when we by grace want to serve him here, We are being ripened to serve Him as kings and priests, forever in glory, being married to Him hereafter as a perfect bride for a perfect bridegroom, where He will say, I see no sin in my Jacob and no transgression in my Israel. And we will be like Him. And we will see Him as He is, face to face, says the book of Revelation. And sometimes I think it's the greatest verse in the whole Bible. Because the Old Testament says, no one will see his face and live. The angels, the perfect angels, cover their faces with their wings. But you, dear believer, through this red blood and this white hope, will have all the black canceled. And you'll be sin free in Emmanuel's land. And you'll behold him face to face, no more through a glass darkly, but forever your bridegroom and you his bride in a perfect marriage. Oh, for the joy that is set before you. Run the race, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Amen. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we thank Thee so much for the gospel. And we grieve, Lord, over the enormity of sin and our fall, but we rejoice over the enormity of the gospel and over Thy grace. We thank Thee for the unspeakable gift of Thy Son. We thank Thee for the unspeakable gift of Thy Spirit working so patiently and repeatedly in our hearts. We thank Thee for the gift of eternal salvation. in thy own Father heart. Lord, we don't know which divine person we love the most, but this we know. We love each of them, and we need them all. And so we thank thee, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, for thy wonderful, amazing, overwhelming triune salvation for hell-worthy sinners and rebels, even such as we are. We thank Thee, second Adam, for undoing all the first Adam has done, and praise Thee for Thy superabounding grace. In Jesus' name, amen.