This morning we're going to be in Genesis chapter 3, reading verses 1 through 6. Looks like it's on page 3 of the Pew Bible. Before we start, let's just bow our heads in a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you that we have your word in front of us, that you have spoken to your prophets and to your apostles. Lord, make it sink deep within to our soul so we can apply it to our lives. In your son's name. Amen. Now, Genesis 3, 1 through 6, the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. It's a familiar passage, Genesis 3. There is so much that is contained in the first three chapters of Genesis, specifically chapter 3. What we're going to be focusing on this morning is mostly in verse 6, that when Eve saw, when it was desirous to her heart, when she touched the fruit, what ends up happening is God has said one thing. that we are looking, touching, experiencing something in a different way than God has said it. And now we become the base. Our senses, our reasoning becomes the foundation why we make every decision, and it's no longer based upon God. So there's a common phrase I hear. A lot of people say, I don't trust anybody but myself. People say this in a very proud way. Is this necessarily a good thing? Yes, people are wrong from time to time. Trusting in other people can be hard. You can be let down. You can be betrayed. But how about yourself? Are you always trustworthy? What is your track record? Have you always been right? Have there times where you've been wrong, where you've been mistaken, where you led somebody astray, where you lied, or where you were not dependable? The answer is yes, we've all been there. But we still have this within ourselves to think that I can trust nobody but myself. I trust nobody but my own reasoning. But the problem with that is your reasoning is just as flawed as everybody else's. So you are not sufficient within yourself to even say that. If you follow that advice, it's foolish advice. But it's the pride that comes from within our hearts to say something like this. So in order to remain on our throne, in our own existence, being our own kings, in our own world that we create, what do we have to do? We have to distance ourselves from God. Because God is king. Because God has spoken. God has prescribed in his word how he wants us to live, but we don't want that. We are all like Adam and Eve. Rather than listening to what God has said, now we're going to touch something. We're going to look at something. We're going to analyze something. And we're going to decide for ourselves if it's good or not, regardless of what God has said. There's a movie I was watching one time. It was an expert, expert thief. He was an expert into breaking into safes. So he broke into the safe and he took out the jewelry. Now where he committed the crime, was in a completely different country than where he lived. So after he took the jewelry out of the safe, he snuck out of the house and he gets into this van that's got a plumber's name on it. So it looks like a plumber van. He gets into that van and he ditches it and he takes a taxi to the airport. He takes the airport, he takes the flight from the airport to his home country. When he arrives in his own home country, he takes a taxi downtown. When he arrives downtown, he walks to his house. When he gets into his house, he walks to the basement, where there's a secret door with a combination. He types the secret code to the combination, he walks through that door, there's another fake door with a fake lever that he pulls, and then the wall slides open. Then he walks in, and there is the safe. where he puts his jewelry. We do the exact same thing with God. We distance ourselves so far from God and what he has said, specifically the unregenerate person, the person who's not born again. They distance themselves so far from God and they have so many reasons and so many excuses and so many methods and so many ways of creating layers and layers and layers and layers from them and God. They distance themselves because they want to hold their own authority Their heart, their own reason, they want to grasp onto that. And like the thief who put that jewelry in his own safe in his house, he is thousands and thousands of miles away from where he took it. What was the first thing Adam and Eve did after they sinned? What did they do? They ran from God's presence. And we've been doing this ever since. We have stolen this authority from God, or at least we think we have, where we are our own person. Our own reason is going to be what we base everything upon. And we treasure this. And we distance ourselves so far from God. that this is what we cling to above all else. So the fallen human nature believes it is the final authority, that it has the final say on all things, that all things in this world must be ran through the prism of our own mind. Our minds and our reason and our experience is the lens that we interpret everything from. And we set aside God and we become our own gods. And this is true in regards to anything that involves reality, anything that involves knowledge, and anything that involves morality. We have set ourselves up as the final determining factor. Now human nature, human nature loves to do good things in a sense it loves to learn. Human nature loves to explore. It loves to research and find cures. It loves to think and solve problems. It loves to discover and it loves to invent. So the person who is not born again, the person who is not regenerate, is capable of doing all of these things. Remember when Paul was bringing the gospel to all of those cities, he'd walk into these cities and he'd see these great statues and these great wonders. So human beings are capable of doing these things. But what happens is instead of doing these things from God's perspective, we do things, the fallen human nature does these things without any reference to God at all. God isn't even in the equation. So human beings being created in the image of God have the ability to create, have the ability to learn, have the ability to engineer and do all of these things, but they're doing this without God in any of it. And that's why when Paul would walk into these cities, he'd see all of these pagan statues, all of these pagan practices, because if you're not worshiping God, There's only one thing left to worship, yourself and nature. And that's exactly the pagan cultures that Paul would walk into. Adam and Eve, before the fall, did everything correctly. So there's a contrast. What Paul would walk into and see in these cities, Adam and Eve, when God first created them, they did everything correctly. Everything they did was filtered through God's will. Everything they'd done was perfect. according to the creation mandate that God had set into place. So God's prism is where everything flowed through. After the fall, now it's our prism that everything flows through. We have set aside God. We have become our own gods. The desire of fallen humanity is to be completely distant from God, or just far enough away where we don't have to acknowledge His authority. This desire for independence from God takes mainly two shapes, two forms. The first one is from knowing and verbally confessing that God is true. but they fail to embrace him through faith. You may hear of this. People say, I believe God, I believe the Bible, I believe he created everything, I believe there's a heaven, I believe there's a hell. You'll meet a lot of people like this, but they haven't embraced him in faith. They acknowledge his existence. It's almost common sense. It's pretty, it's common sense just to do this. This isn't hard, but there's such a distance where they need God in their life because they have to have an answer for why they exist and justify why everything is around them. But they keep such a distance from God that they don't bring him in through faith and filter everything through what he has said. They keep that distance so they are still their own final authority. That's the first one. The second one is by denying God's existence altogether. and placing humanity at the center of the universe. Both are in the same camp. Either one of these scenarios, whether you believe in the existence of God or not, we maintain the high ground and God is down here. We may acknowledge the existence of God, but we never bow to Him in submission. Our reason and our experience is still held in high esteem. We have not submitted to Him. He's just there as somebody that we have as a reference point or as a benefit or somebody to cry out to and help when times get tough. But if times are good, There's no acknowledging Him. And the second one is if we refuse to acknowledge the existence of God at all, it's the same thing. We have set Him aside and now we live how we want to live. God doesn't have any say in my life. And that's where people want Him. Both of these positions stand on the same platform. God is down here, and human reason and experience is up here. And this is the rebellious heart that we have all inherited from Adam. This is the result of the fall. And this is why the world is such a broken place that it is, full of death and full of suffering, because this is not how God has prescribed us to live at all. We have now made ourselves the final reference point. When we hear something, we have exalted ourselves as being the final judge. And even Christians are guilty from doing this from time to time. When the Bible says that God has created the heavens and the earth and everything in it, the unregenerate person, through their own reason, and filtering it through the prism of their own experience, rather than acknowledging God as the creator for all of these things, what do they say? the Big Bang, we evolved from nothing. So rather than acknowledging God for his creation, we say that the earth created itself. When the Bible says that we're created in God's image, and we reflect and imitate his likeness, what does the unregenerate person say instead? That we're nothing but matter in motion. We don't have a soul. All we are is what our brain does. See how we shift this. The Bible says we're created in his image with both body and soul. We don't want that. So what do we say? We're nothing but material. We're nothing but the chemical in our brains. When God tells us anything in his word, the unregenerate heart filters out what God has said and replaces it with what their own reason has come up with. They will not believe in God, they will not trust in God, and they will not submit to God. because God does not line up with our way of thinking. So God is the immoral one. God is the wrong one. I'm right. God is wrong. That's what, in essence, what people are saying when they do this. Since humanity has decided to set itself up as its own authority, they no longer submit to the ultimate authority. And that's what's happening today in our current culture for the past 20 years. It's not that we open up the Bible and say, oh, I don't believe this to be true. What our culture now does, it opens up the Bible and it reads about sexual ethics and says, these sexual ethics are immoral. And when they say that, what they're saying is, my belief on sexual ethics is tolerant. God is immoral. Therefore, I don't believe the Bible because God is immoral. Very dangerous ground. What is that person saying? That regarding sexual ethics, God is the oppressor and he's not allowing me to be free. God is the one who hates. I'm the one who loves. So through our own sinful fallen reasoning of the unregenerate heart, we have elevated ourselves up to the point where we are the final determining factor for morality. And this is exactly what Satan said. humanity would achieve in Genesis 3.5, and you will be like God. And we've been there ever since. Ecclesiastes 7.29, see this I found that God has made humanity upright, but they have sought out many schemes. God made us perfect. We chose this path. Isaiah 53, 6, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. If God's authority is in need of human approval, human authority has been elevated higher than God. If God no longer has the final authority, well, guess what? We do. This means God's no longer God. We are. God is never the final authority. He has to first wait for our approval. Since God is God, he cannot change. He cannot deny himself. Which means he doesn't need anything from you. We think maybe he does. Or we think that God can use correction. Or we think that our reason and our experience can reinterpret the Bible to be a better book and to make God out to be a better God. When God speaks, it's automatically true regardless of what any human being thinks. When God speaks, there is no probability. There is no error. There is no lack of information that he didn't have. There is no hate coming from God's heart. It's pure. It's true. It's right. It is the foundation. There is no need for improvement when God speaks. And if we think there is, what we've done is we've elevated ourselves higher than God himself. Reality does not bend to conform to your reason. Our reason must conform to the reality that God has already established. And this is where that tension exists. We won't submit to God and his reason. So we create our own reason and try to force God through our own prism. Have you ever asked yourself this? Maybe you're laying in bed at night and you can't sleep or you're driving a long distance. How is it that we even have this ability to reason to begin with? We take it for granted that we're able to reason, we're able to abstract, we're able to think, we're able to compare, we're able to contrast. We do it every day. It's second nature. Have you ever stopped and thought about it? Why am I able to do this? And it's not just me. Every human being on the planet does the same thing. They reason, they think, they compare, they contrast. How is it that humans can do this? What is the source of this reasoning? And the answer is simple. Because God is the source of reason. We reflect this ability because the infinite creator has created us in his image and we reflect that. It's in our very nature. It's in our soul to do this. God has put this within us. So the source of reason itself, the fact that we can even do that, the source of that is God himself, which means reason alone is not sufficient. Reason itself, our ability to reason is not sufficient in itself because it doesn't stop there. Because our only reason we can do this is because God has implanted this ability within us. So what we do is we just push God aside. And what's next? Well, our reason is next. And that's where we stay. And that's what we make sufficient. And this becomes the idol of our heart. Like that thief who stole that jewelry out of the one safe and went that whole distance to put it in the other safe. This is what we do. We take our reason with us. We run far, far from God. And we live our life in the corner of our own little universe through our own prism of our own reason and our own experience. not thinking it through. Why am I even able to do this to begin with? Because I'm created in the image of God who is capable of reason. So what we do then is we make ourselves the final court of appeal. Adam and Eve did this in the garden. What did God say to Adam? God said to Adam, you may surely eat of any tree of the garden that you want, but the tree of knowledge of good and evil, this one you cannot eat from. Now along comes Satan. What were Satan's first words to Eve? Did God really say? The world hasn't been the same since. Because what happened? The reason why there's so much evil and suffering in this world is because we would rather do things our own way than God's way. We're rebellious to the core, and we have set ourselves up to be God over God himself. When Satan made this offer to Eve, he introduced another way of looking at things, another way to see the world, another way to view reality, another way to be moral, another perspective to view God's truth. It's either the way God said it, Or now Satan has introduced another way. Now it's my way. God's way or my way. And now there was a choice. And now the human reason started to think. And then the desire to be separate from God came in. And our own personal way of determining right and wrong was developed right there. And if you've ever heard that song by Frank Sinatra, I did it my way. That's exactly what we inherited from Adam and Eve. We have enthroned ourselves to be God over God himself. And from this point forward, our way of thinking, our way of reasoning has been nothing but destructive. because it doesn't have a foundation anymore but ourselves. And if I am my own foundation, and you are your own foundation, and the seven billion people in this world are their own foundation, we have seven billion different opinions in this world all competing against each other. And we wonder why we can't find peace and harmony and love on earth. Well, we have pushed God out. And if we're not allowing God to be the foundation for our thinking, we're never going to get there. Because of the sin that has entered into our hearts, we have rebelled against his ways. So human beings willfully choose to worship the creation, nature, rather than God himself. How so? Well, people say that the universe is eternal and that it has always been here. And those who are saying that, what they're saying is there's no need for a God or God because the universe has always been here. Others say life is nothing but an illusion. That we're not really here, but we just think we are. Therefore, there's no real God to be accountable to. This isn't real. Others say, you know, we have all of this design and we have DNA. How do you explain this? Well, it's just a product of an alien experiment. That aliens have seeded life here on earth. So many people are going in that direction today, especially our younger culture. They want something to believe in. It's not going to be God. So what do we do? We go to aliens. And now people think that we're a product of aliens and they're just waiting for him to come to earth. Others claim that today the universe came by random chance over millions of years, which Darwin popularized back in 1859. Do you see a pattern here? If you go out and ask a hundred people where we came from, they're going to come up with all of these different theories. If you turn on National Geographic or if you turn on the Discovery Channel, every single thing you see in nature will have an evolutionary base to it. It will not acknowledge God as the creator. So then what's the only option left? We'll worship the creation itself. And that's what we do. It will believe in anything but God in the Bible. It will refuse to acknowledge God and base its foundation upon anything else but Him. To get as far away from God as possible. Then there's the other person. who acknowledges that God did all of this. They even say the way the Bible says it, that it's impossible for all of this to come into existence without God, and that God does set the moral standards, and that God is the creator. See, these are all verbal confessions, but people will acknowledge this in their mind. They give assent to it, but they have not trusted in it through faith. They don't embrace Him. They don't submit to Him. They understand that God exists, but they don't believe in Him. They acknowledge Him, but not as Lord and not as Savior. And this may be the most deceitful thing in our hearts to filter out. the person who confesses that they acknowledge the existence of God, but have not yet trusted in him as Lord and Savior. See, the sad thing is, is the atheist and the person who's only given assent, but not trust, are actually sitting in the same seat. just because you believe in the existence of God has not gotten you any closer to God. It's a lateral move. Okay, God exists. Well, the demons themselves believe that God exists, and they tremble. They're not any closer to the throne of God either. So it's just self-evident that God exists. And by just simply confessing that, and saying, yes, I believe God did all these things, and I believe that the Ten Commandments, those are lateral moves, unless you've embraced Him through faith. Unless you've confessed your sin and believed, repented and believed, these are simple lateral movements and we deceive ourselves because then we think we're Christian, but in our hearts we're still denying Him and in our hearts our reason is still exalted higher than God because we have not submitted to Him. Whether it's atheism or simple acknowledgment, we're both in the same camp. We still hold our final authority over God. And sure, there's time from time. We'll borrow from the Ten Commandments. We'll borrow from God's worldview. We'll say that moral absolutes exist. And then later on, we'll go say they don't. People go back and forth on these issues. And what they're showing is you can't live consistently by believing that God does not exist. Because there's gonna come times where you're faced with reality that you have to acknowledge that this is God's world and we're simply living in it. Even though you want to distance yourself as far away as possible that you can. Whether a person actually believes in God or not, they still have to live by his rules. They still have to live in his universe. And how God created it, that can't be undone. So what do we do? We create our own alternative reality to live in where we push God way out here and we create our own rules and our own ethics and our own beliefs in reality. So the problem is the heart. Right here, our sinful heart, the motivation, why we do what we do. When humanity sinned, we didn't lose the image of God. We can still be moral people. We can still think in absolutes. We still use logic and reason that God has implanted in us. But we do so not acknowledging the Creator who's done this. We push Him aside and just use what He has given us for our own benefit and for our own desires. We still refuse to bow the knee. Which leaves us to this question then. All of this being said, where does this leave us? What hope is there for humanity since this is the reality of where we are today as a fallen human race? There was a verse I read earlier. I only read half of it. Isaiah 53, 6, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way. Here's the second half of that verse. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. There's our hope. This is the gospel. The very God that we've turned our back to is calling us back to him. He's providing a way for us to come to him through faith. Salvation rests in the very God that we have told no to. Salvation rests in the very God that we have elevated ourselves over and against. This is the grace of God. He's calling all people everywhere to repent. Not just to give verbal assent, but trust, faith. This is where hope is found. We need a Savior because we need to be saved from ourselves. We believe that it's freedom to live however we morally please, but it's actually bondage. We believe that there's joy and pleasure to live however we want to live. But in reality, it's bondage. We need a Savior to save us from ourself. We need a Savior to break this grip that sin has over our lives. Because of sin, our minds don't work the way they're supposed to. We don't think God's thoughts. Because of sin, our desires are immoral. And because of sin, our wills are in bondage. The average human being doesn't understand. They don't realize how much sin has corrupted their hearts. The other day I was walking along a trail. I found this railroad spike. It has to be at least a hundred years old. At least it's covered in rust. I'm going to go online and look to see how you get rust off it because I want to kind of restore it back to its original shape and size. But you can tell it's a railroad spike, but it's just so completely engrossed in rust for these hundreds of years that it's been sitting there that you can barely tell what it is. The same thing with the human soul. We still maintain the image of God, but that has been shattered, that has been broken, that has been corrupted. We don't reflect who God has created us to be. So we see this now in Acts, when Paul describes the reason why God called him to ministry. Paul writes, "...to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, and that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and a place among those who are sanctified by me in faith." What's the book of Acts telling us here? When a person is born again, their eyes become open. Their eyes have been shut the whole time. Now they become open. Why were they shut? Because going all the way back to Genesis 3, human nature surrendered itself over to Satan. The day Adam and Eve ate the fruit, Spiritual deadness entered into the human race. So when a person is born again, the Lord regenerates our soul from within. He gives us a new heart. Our eyes become open. When a person becomes born again, they turn. They have a change of mind, which results in a change of action. They turn from the darkness to the light. This is called repentance. This is true repentance. Not just saying, God, I'm sorry for I sinned, but it's an actual change of heart, which leads to a change of action, a disposition. The Holy Spirit has now entered in. The power of sin has been broken. He has worked within our heart now, the heart of flesh, a sensitivity to the ways of God, a love, a passion, a desire for the things of God that we didn't have prior. And what does this mean? That we have now surrendered our reason under God's once again. Positionally, this is what the Holy Spirit does to our heart. When a person becomes born again, they turn from the darkness to the light. They are broken free from the power of Satan, and they are transferred into the kingdom of God. When a person refuses to become born again, they are willfully choosing to remain in the domain of darkness under the power of Satan. See, this is a spiritual battle. Boy, I wish it was just an intellectual one. I wish that all we had to do was just provide information for people, and then that information would do the trick. But there's two problems with that. First, our reasoning and our thinking doesn't work properly to receive that information. Secondly, our hearts are dead. So what we need is the work of the Holy Spirit to regenerate a person. It's a moral issue just as much as it is an intellectual issue. Knowledge itself is not going to save. There's a moral bondage on our hearts that God has to break. And this is what God breaks when we preach the gospel. He breaks that. This is our confidence when we preach the gospel because this is our weapon. It's our spiritual weapon. So when we're sharing the gospel with somebody, the power of the words, God will use it how he sees fit. He can use it to save the person, and he can use it to continue to harden the person's heart. It's his sovereign choice. But don't think that we can just store up all of this information in our heads, and then walk up to somebody and say, this, this, this, this, this, and boof, they're gonna say, oh, I see the error of my ways. Unless God grants that repentance to the individual through the preaching of the gospel, it's not gonna work. Which means, anybody with a Bible, if they're faithful to it, and they're preaching it, and they're sharing it. Anybody with a Bible, regardless of your education, anybody with a Bible can walk up to the most hard-hearted atheist, share the gospel with them, and they can be converted. We get intimidated because we don't know all the answers. Well, the answers don't rest just within the information. It's a spiritual war. It's a spiritual battle. And it's the Word of God that saves, and it's the Word of God that converts the heart. Now, the information and the evidence, those are good things to use in support of the gospel. But that's not where the power rests. It rests in the Word and God's sovereign power. So sanctification now for the believer. We still, if we're honest, a believer still fights with God because the presence of sin is still in our heart. There's times where we read scripture and we're like, yes, Lord, that's true. But then the rest of the day we live contrary to what we just read and were edified with. Generally, it doesn't really necessarily come with doctrine. We understand the sixth commandment. We understand the fourth commandment. Where it comes is when we read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus says, don't worry. Don't worry. Well, Lord, you don't know what I'm going to face tomorrow. Well, yeah, he does. Do you see how God tells us not to worry, but we still worry? God tells us the very things in our life have been already planned in advance. There is nothing that can come to pass that God has not ordained. But yet we worry that tomorrow this and this can happen, or such and such can happen. And when we worry, our mind and our reasoning are now elevating itself over the sovereignty of God and God's command to tell us not to do that. Because we say, God, you don't understand my situation. You don't understand what I'm going through. You don't understand what's going to happen tomorrow. We may not verbally say that to God, but in our hearts, that's what we hold, because that's why we worry. So it's in the practical things of life where we still elevate our reason over to God as believers, which is why this is going to be a constant struggle to the day we're in the presence of the Lord. Because what we naturally think is left, when we read Scripture, it's actually right. What we naturally think in our own human reason is up, when we read Scripture, it's actually down. So we're training our minds constantly to be thinking God's thoughts after him because our ways are not his ways, especially through the influence of sin on our mind. We have to reconfigure our entire way of thinking to match God's thinking and to trust him there. Where God has spoken, we trust. What God has not spoken, we trust in the promises that he's given us. because it's not an exhaustive list of every single thing. It's a sufficient list of every single thing. And we rest in what he has told us. And we don't try to go beyond what is written with our own reason to try to figure out who God is, because he hasn't revealed that to us. So we live by faith. For the rest of our lives, we're learning, often the hard way, that our thinking is seriously flawed. And the person who says, I don't trust anybody but myself, has to really reconsider all of their thoughts from the past to see how unaligned, our natural way of thinking is with God. So what we have to come to the conclusion is, I don't even trust myself. I have to check my reason, my intellect, my will, my desire over to Christ, and read his word, and be filled with his word, and allow this to guide me, and to say, Lord, I live by faith. The Word of God is the template. The Word of God is the standard. It is the foundation. Because it's reflecting the very mind of God Himself. He's telling us who He is. He holds the overall authority in defining all things. He tells us what's right and wrong. He is the filter by which we interpret every single thought that we have. Not us. Let's pray. Lord, there is so much for us to work on in our thinking, and in our reasoning, and in our minds, all of this stemming from our heart. Lord, we just pray at this time, show us anywhere in our life, in our lifestyle, in our thinking, where we have elevated ourselves above you. And Lord, we pray for the person who is running from you. We pray for the person who is hiding from you, who is treasuring their own freedom. Lord, thinking that there's pleasure here, thinking that there's fulfillment here, thinking that there's liberation, Lord, when it's just bondage. We pray, Lord, that we have the confidence to simply speak the truth in love, because that's where the power is, and that's where you work. So we thank you for all these things. In your son's name, amen.