40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 6

Episode Date: February 24, 2015

The fall of man and the God who searches

you are listening to a podcast produced and distributed by christholdfast.com please visit christholdfast.com for additional resources this is 40 minutes in the old testament Thanks for joining us for another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. I'm Daniel Emery Price, and I am here as always, well, as usual, as always with Chad Bird, as most of the time, Brandon Hanson. Hey, guys. Hey, everybody. Chad, where did we leave off last time?

We left off in chapter 3 of Genesis. At the very end of last week's program, we got into this very well-known chapter. I think we covered about the first five verses, so we'll pick up from there. And the goal is to cover as much of this chapter as we can, although it is extremely deep and extremely rich. So there's lots of good stuff here. All right. Well, take it away. We'll get right into it. I thought before we look at some more of the details, we ought to ask ourselves whether what we usually call this chapter is what we should be calling it. And I'm guilty of this too. When anybody mentions Genesis 3, for me anyway, the first, I guess, title or summary statement of the chapter that comes to mind is the fall of man.

So if someone says, what's Genesis 3 about? Most everybody says, oh, well, that's about the temptation. That's about the fall of Adam and Eve. And when we answer it that way, immediately we orient ourselves toward seeing things from the perspective of sin and death and the curse and all of those things by which we are condemned. So I'm actually trying to even transition my own mind away from that. And thinking of Genesis 3, not so much as about the fall of man, even though that is certainly part of the story, but more about the rise of the gospel. So certainly it's about the fall of Adam and Eve into sin, but more importantly, much more importantly, it's about the rise of the gospel. It's about how God, in his grace and mercy, reacts to the fall of his children, how he approaches them, how he speaks to them, and most importantly then about the promise that he gives to Adam and Eve as well as to all of us about his will to save them in this coming seed.

so I put that out there at the beginning because I think it's important as a way of kind of orienting our minds around what this chapter should really focus us on that yes it's about temptation and sin and the fall but more than that it's about our good and gracious God who comes to rescue us in our lostness and to do so by this seed who gives his own life that we might have life.

So keep that in mind as we go through the rest of the chapter. I want to just kind of briefly recap the first five verses. You're familiar with the story, no doubt, about the serpent approaching Eve and initiating this conversation with her in which he really gets her to the point of really where all of our temptations lie. He gets her to the point of questioning whether what God says is true, whether what God says is best for us. As I was reflecting on this chapter over the last few days, it does seem to me that that's really the foundation of all temptation. It's to, in one way or another, to depart from the Word of God.

I look at my own life and the way that I'm tempted, the temptations to which I have caved on innumerable occasions. It doesn't matter what the commandment is. it doesn't matter what the sin is it all goes back to me deciding that what is best for me is not what God says but what I say

what is best for me is not what God's word lays out but what my own words or emotions or experiences say is best for me so really what I'm doing when this temptation comes to me and I begin to consider it or to move beyond that and to delight in it or to move beyond delighting in it and actually to commit whatever this sin is,

I'm setting myself up as the one whose word is final instead of God whose word is final. And this is the way it works in my own life. This is the way it works in everybody else's life as well as in really the life of the church, that temptation and sin, which we see beginning here with Eve and with Adam, it's not merely for us to do wrong things, which I think is ordinary to the way that we think of temptation. You know, there's the little devil on our shoulder who's talking to us,

trying to get us to do wrong things, bad things. It's really not that so much as he's getting us to listen to him, to listen to his words, to listen to our own words, to listen to anybody else's words more so than we would listen to what God himself says. If you look at the story as a whole, you've got the woman listening to the serpent, and you've got the man listening to the woman, and nobody's listening to God. His word is relegated to subordinate status, and whenever that happens, inevitably sin and all of its consequences are going to follow. So rather than looking at this story simplistically as just Eve deciding that she is going to consume this fruit and Adam deciding that he's going to as well, really what's happening here, what they're truly eating is the poison of following something that is contrary to the way that God says it should be, contrary to his words. And it's fascinating to me to see how the devil is at work here because more or less what he – the scenario that he sets up before Eve and Adam is that God is holding out on them. that what they need, what they would be satisfied with,

what would really make them happy would be beyond that which God has given. That's the way that the devil is always at work. He's trying to get us to believe that God is not truly good, that God is not truly interested and zealous for gifting us with those things which are best for us he he convinces adam and eve that god was stingy he was he was holding out on them and that really if they would only consume this fruit then they would actually have that which would give them a happiness beyond that which god which god could give them and that's again that's the same thing that i see happening uh in my own life i i think at its root you could call

it uh this idea of of covetousness uh in fact i was looking at this in in the hebrew and uh the uh verse six where it says that the woman saw that the tree was desirable uh for for making one why is that that root word for desirable is the same root that we get uh the word covet from It's this idea of an evil desire, desiring that which God has not given. And that's at the root of what's going on here. That's what covetousness is. It's desiring that, craving that which God has not given. And he doesn't give it for good reason, because he knows that it's going to produce death.

It's going to lead us down paths that God in his love and grace does not desire for us. So anyway, that's kind of some big picture kind of thoughts looking at this opening temptation. I think it's important to throw in here too, since I just mentioned something about the Hebrew, something that's not immediately obvious in the English. And that is that throughout the opening dialogue between Eve and the serpent, anytime that the serpent says something like, you shall not eat, or the woman responds with saying, you shall not eat from it or touch it, every time that you is in the plural. which i think is uh is revealing it indicates that throughout this conversation eve is not alone but that adam is is there is there with her he's he's standing by silently he's not defending her he's not contradicting the lies of the serpent instead he's standing beside her being addressed

by the serpent listening to the dialogue but not engaging instead he uh he really uh it's it's a major fail on his part as her husband as uh also a priest to speak that which god has has spoken to him and in so doing to uh to reveal the lie of the lie of the devil you know we have adam and eve In a garden And they're sinless They don't have the Propensity to sin, the inclination to sin The way we do

So there has to be a tempter No tempter No sin Just don't do it They're not talked into it Everybody knows That you don't eat forbidden fruit It's not

Difficult You just don't do it And nobody reaches out their hand and takes it Without first being deceived And even though we have a sin nature Even that sin nature works the same way And deceives us into doing things that we know we shouldn't do Especially as Christians

As we have the new man and the old man Warring against each other When we reach out and take forbidden fruit Things that we know we ought not do That we shouldn't have, that we don't need That are bad for us it's not us just doing it it's us deceiving ourselves into thinking that it's a good idea uh that that it's that is something that we do need that is something that will satisfy

something in us and uh and so it doesn't even though they're sinless it still works the same way um that we uh all sin is just believing a lie we never approach sin as something that we're going to do because it's bad and that's why we're good because we think we've packed ourselves into exactly that it is a good thing it is something by which i will gain something i will become more free when i do this and in the end we end up losing everything not gaining anything but losing more than what we had to begin with and never finding freedom in it Yeah, I think it's interesting that Paul's argument in Romans 6 is not, hey, you shouldn't sin because, you know, even because God hates it, because it's contrary to the law of God. That's not even his argument.

His argument is that we shouldn't sin all the more that grace may abound because sin is slavery. His argument is like, don't do it because there's no freedom there. and that's the lie that we tell ourselves is that there is freedom there that there is something there that will satisfy something there that we need something there that frees us and his argument is the opposite of that

that sin is slavery, there's no freedom there so freedom is freedom that's at stake for Paul don't return back to the yoke of slavery, right? this is his argument and so that's the lie, the sin is bondage

and this is why you have the language in the new testament of christ said i've come to set the captives free this kind of thing um there's it's a free there's a freedom issue with sin and righteousness and and all of that and and redemption and the reason we don't want to now that we've been forgiven and uh and justified the reason we don't want to go and return and just do whatever we want is because freedom's at stake yeah that and that fits that fits perfectly with the way that we see eve reacting once uh well adam and eve once they have taken the uh taking the forbidden fruit they think that what they're going to achieve is this likeness to god which is going to be good this knowledge of good and evil which is going to profit them but it says that

when the eyes of both of them were opened they knew that they were naked so they make thick leaves and and sew them together for for loin coverings yeah it's suddenly it's a sudden and complete reversal of what they what they expect and actually uh i was reading luther on this And he makes a great point that the devil makes promises that he is good on. He promises them that their eyes will be opened. And he says they will know good and evil. That's his promise. And it's true.

Their eyes are opened, except when he delivers on the promise. It's not what they deceived themselves into thinking it was. Yeah, it's interesting. the second they they eat the fruit they lose the freedom to be naked and unashamed which is a pretty extravagant freedom to be naked and unashamed to be naked and oblivious is that's that's that's a pretty big freedom uh you're really free it's always struck me too that he he promises them something which they they really already have he says you will be like god but how were adam and eve made they were made in the image and likeness of god so they were already

like god but what is what his promise is is that they're going to be uh in some way different they'll be like him in a different way and in a in a better way it's fascinating to me it always has been that the very first action of sinful people is to make for themselves coverings. That their very first action is to try and fashion together something that they can hide behind.

And that propensity to try and come up with some kind of covering, some kind of shield behind which we can hide. It's the same way that we work today. We have the same kind of reaction to sin. Again, Luther, in his commentary on Genesis, says that sin never wants to be sin. It always wants to be righteousness.

So it masquerades as something else. And so sin doesn't want to be sin here, so it wants to cover up itself. And that's the way that we still work. We want to hide behind the mask of hypocrisy, or we want to hide behind a kind of self-righteousness. We want to sew together some sort of righteousness of our own that we can hide behind, because we know we have to have something. And yet, what we come up with, what they came up with is insufficient, as we see later in the chapter. When God takes away these coverings that they made for themselves, and he gives them garments of skins.

So God does give them a covering. He does provide for a covering of their nakedness, but it's something that he does. It's not something which they contrive in and of themselves. I do want to throw in, too, I just realized this when I was looking at this chapter earlier today. Okay. It's amazing to me – this is kind of a parenthesis – that it doesn't matter how many times I read the same chapter in Scripture, every single time something new jumps out at me, and this is no exception. It says they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves these coverings. Well, there's two different parts of the Scripture where you have the tree of life mentioned, Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 22. And it's always struck me as odd that in both of those chapters, it says that the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations.

and I can't help but then connect it with what they're doing here what Adam and Eve are doing here they sew together these leaves to make for themselves coverings because they're not healed because they're now sick with sin and yet you have the promise from God

that the tree of life which is really Christ himself is going to be the leaves of this tree are going to be for the healing of the nations And so Christ himself comes to provide us with this covering, this healing that we can only receive from him. I guess we'll move on with 8 and following because I want to get to God's address to Adam and Eve. It says in verse 8 that they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden.

And so they hide themselves among the trees of the garden. And then verse 9 has become for me one of my favorite verses in this chapter. It's the very first question that God poses to humanity. He says, where are you? Now, think about this. God knows where they are. He's all-knowing. He's omniscient. So it's not – this is not a question that is posed from a state of ignorance.

He's not seeking information, in other words. He knows the answer to the question, and some questions are like that. So really what is he asking, and what does this question reveal about who he is? And that's why I say this verse has become for me one of my favorite verses in the whole chapter because of what it reveals about God. He doesn't approach Adam and Eve as the judge who's ready to condemn them to hell because of what they've done. He doesn't approach them as someone who is not interested in their recovery, but only in their judgment. he really approaches them like a father would approach his lost children

he says where are you it's one word in Hebrew and in that one word you have packed so much because you have a God who comes to seek out Adam and Eve knowing full well what they've done

he's aware that they have forsaken his word he's a word that they have coveted have desired and have eaten of the forbidden fruit and yet his his goal is to find them and to call them to repentance and to forgive them and to restore them to where they need to be which which tells us so much about the kind of God that we have. This is really the portrait of Christ himself who comes as the shepherd who comes to seek and to save the lost.

This is Christ coming to seek and to save his lost Adam and his lost Eve. He's not a God who approaches us wanting to condemn us, but quite the opposite. He's the God who wants to save us. So he says, where are you? hoping, hoping that his lost children will confess that where they are is in a state

where they shouldn't be. They're hiding from him because now sin and fear and shame have taken over because they rebelled against his word. So he's calling them to repentance. He's beckoning them to come to him and to be treated as a father treats a child, as one who is welcomed back and forgiven. I think that this is a view of God that a lot of people don't have. It seems like a lot of people's view of God, especially the unbeliever's view of God,

and this is really the fault of the church that they have this view um but it seems that they are oblivious kind of to the passage in john say where uh right after john 3 16 you know where where it says you know he didn't he didn't he didn't send his son to condemn the world but that through him the world might be saved god is not a god that is looking for somebody to judge or looking for somebody to condemn that's that's not what he does he is he is looking for someone to to love for someone to pour out his goodness on and all he's got to choose from now are bad people and so he come and lost people and so he comes and saves them that's that's how the love of god and the goodness of god is best than shown to us so he's not he's not a god that's

looking around saying you know i'm just i'm desperate to condemn something but rather i'm i'm desperate to love something and to to be good to something and to do that uh i will save i will save something and uh and i'll make it good again that's a very different god than a god who is just waiting for you to mess up so he can pour out his judgment on you that's that's not at all what he's trying to do yeah so often we have a we have a view of god as uh as a god who's a he's a scorekeeper you know he he's he's the god who keeps track of how many times we've messed up so that he can give us what we have coming or who's who's always just got his eyes open for how we're going to stumble how we're going to how we're going to fall uh i think that's the that's

the view of god that we're that we're born with because we're we're born in the sin we're born under the the condemnation of the law but that's not who god is he's the god who seeks and saves the lost he's the god who uh comes to adam and eve when they have broken the one commandment he gave them the one command but that that was all they had all of these trees to eat from just don't eat from this one tree and yet he uh he comes to save them and that's that's what i meant at the beginning of our conversation when i talked about genesis 3 not being as much about the fall of man as about the rise of the rise of the gospel because here we we've already seen it in genesis 1 and 2, but here we see it, a different side of God.

Of course, God is the God who creates, who gives everything, who does all these wonderful, beautiful things in Genesis 1 and 2, but He's also the God who, when there is sin, when there is disobedience and rebellion, doesn't turn His back on His creation. There's a prayer in the church that talks about, I think we prayed at this last, on Ash Wednesday, something about the God who hates nothing that he has made or doesn't despise anything that he has made,

but instead he loves. That's who he is. And he demonstrates it in his seeking and saving Adam and Eve here, as well as giving them the promise of the ultimate salvation, which we have in Christ. so moving on uh so we cover as much of the chapters as we can the the next part of uh

of the conversation uh is really where we have this the blame game going on uh god says to adam where are you and then he asked them who told you that you were naked have you eat from the tree of which i commanded you not to eat and the man blames both god and the woman he says the woman whom you gave to be with me she gave me from the tree and i ate and then when god speaks to eve and says what is this you have done she blames the serpent who deceived her Now If you would have asked me How this story would have gone from there

I probably would have guessed That the very next thing that God would have done Would have been to ask The serpent Why did you do this He's asked Adam, he's asked Eve Now he's going to ask the serpent But he doesn't

The Lord has no Conversation With the serpent Instead all that he does is address him with a curse which I think also is indicative of the kind of God that we have he

is the God who seeks and saves his lost children but he doesn't seek and save the source of evil, the father of lies instead he pronounces a curse upon him he says because you've done this curse

to you more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field and says on his belly he shall go and shall eat dust all the days of his life. But, and I want to come back to that in just a second, but while I'm talking about this, I think it's very significant too that God does not directly curse Adam and Eve.

He does the serpent. He says, curse it or you, but when he speaks to Adam, he doesn't curse Adam. He says, curse it as the ground because of you, and he doesn't curse Eve either. They're part of a fallen world where there's going to be pain, there's going to be living by the sweat of your brow, but his children are not cursed. Instead, they are given this beautiful promise, which we have in verse 15, which we definitely want to talk about for a minute.

This is in the context of God speaking to the serpent. After he curses the serpent, he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel. This has long been called the first gospel. It's the first explicit promise that God makes that he is going to undo the work of Satan by sending one who will suffer and die

and in so doing destroy the work of the devil. I love the fact that this first promise is in the context of his address to the serpent. So it's like he speaks this beautiful grand truth while he's talking to the father of lies. So it's a direct in-your-face to the devil himself. And it's a beautiful promise to Adam and Eve, and it's a beautiful promise to us too. He describes enmity that's going to exist between the devil and between humanity, specifically the woman

but it's also going to be between her seed and the devil's seed so here we have pictured really this this conflict which originates here which goes on even today between good and evil between heaven and hell between the powers of evil

and between the grace of God it culminates with a rather strange statement. It says this enmity is going to be between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. This is a very unusual phrase in Hebrew because this is the only place in the Old Testament where you have the feminine pronoun connected with this word seed.

I mean it's as strange a statement as if we in English were to talk about her sperm, which of course a woman doesn't have. So there's an oddity to this that many of the commentators, including Luther himself, he saw already a hint here of the fact that this seed would be very different from any other seed. In fact, it would be a seed that would only come from a woman with no man's involvement. So Luther saw already here a hint of the virgin birth, that this seed would come not with the participation of a man, but instead would come by the power of the Holy Spirit. And then it concludes with, he shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. So if you have the image of a serpent, the image is of a serpent striking the heel of this seed, but at the same time, you have the heel crushing the head of the serpent. And what we have pictured here, really in this first prophecy, is what happens at the crucifixion. There you have Christ being struck on the heel.

That is to say, death falling upon this promised seed. But when that happens, you have the head of the serpent being crushed. You have evil being destroyed along with sin and death and all the powers that are against us. So it's a beautiful promise of what God gives to Adam and Eve and fulfills in the person of Christ. And it really becomes the foundation of all of the other prophecies of the Messiah that we hear in the rest of the Old Testament. They all grow out of this one initial gospel promise to Adam and Eve. Well, the thing that I think is interesting about this that I see in kind of this whole Genesis chapter 3 passage is Satan, we know that Satan's real war is with God. He fell from heaven.

He was after God. He was after God's position of authority, majesty in heaven. he wanted to be God, since he can't do that, since he has fallen, since God has cast him out, and he knows that battle is already won, and he's lost, he decides to go after God in another way here, he decides to go after the thing that God loves most, his creation, the thing that he said is very good, and he wants to get at God, not just by killing God's creation, but by making god land the killing blow he's going to have god kill his own creation and he thinks he's going to trick god into this so if we look at this in sort of a crass way as a joke satan trying to play a

joke here and he thinks he's a pretty good jokesmith but his joke falls so so flat uh god gets the last laugh if we want to talk about this crassly as a joke. God gets the last word. He goes, Satan, hold on. I'm going to take this joke that you're trying to play here and I'm going to provide the punchline.

Because the death that you would like me to bring against my creation, I'm going to supply that death to my son. Yeah, his heel is going to be bruised. But here's the punchline, Satan. that bruised heel is going to crush your head you're going to die for this this is only going

to come back to bite you the devil convinces man to do that which god has promised will kill him and and it's not just a um you know just that we'll die which we do but that uh that it will eternally separate us from god um that it will that it will kill us uh it'll destroy and kill our relationship with god and uh god comes in and through death kills death um it's it's a it's an amazing flipping of uh of the devil's script where uh where he would say while convinced the thing that's made in your image to do that which you've said not to do

place enmity between between you and you and your creation I will make your creation not trust you I'll make your creation it's interesting because the devil succeeds in one sense

that post fall that we're all born enemies of God this is a huge win for the devil oh the this is uh he takes great joy in the fact that as we're born in enmity towards god that we don't that we don't love god we don't love our creator that we that we hate him that we're uh that we're running from him and uh god being who god is does the unthinkable and leaves the 99 and finds the one he takes on flesh and blood and and uh becomes the lamb of god who

takes away the sins of the world he becomes the one who seeks and saves the lost he does something that is really pretty inconceivable uh to reverse what the devil has has incited man to do to himself it's not just about the fall of man but this says something about who god is and goodness of god and love of god not just about hey we're how sinful we are and how uh how terrible we've become but uh just how long-suffering god is how how god's uh goodness and god's love for his creation remains unaffected by by man's fall it doesn't it doesn't fluctuate it doesn't take a huge dip can he consistently and without waiver has love for this thing that he has created and will literally go to the most unfathomable lengths to restore it.

What God tells them there in sort of that first gospel presentation says something absolutely incredible about who God is. Yeah, those are great points. As you were talking, I was thinking if anything, what the fall of man does is brings out even more the unfathomable love of god and it never wavers it never it never changes god doesn't pull back reduces love because of because of man's sin but what we see in god's reaction to sin in his promise to overcome evil and to atone for our sin is the the love of god made even more manifest to us so if if evil does anything it

doesn't destroy the love of god it reveals the love of god right he was willing to to do whatever it took willing to suffer hell itself rather than to to lose us right um god god has always been love it's a statement and it's a true statement but it's a statement i know is true i know it because of the cross yes in fact uh john 3 16 i i think would be better translated this way god loved us in this way by giving his only begotten son right yeah this is the way that god demonstrates his love for us this is this is not just the extent of his love but the revelation of his love this is this is the way that he loves us by giving us a son yeah uh gerard has that great hymn uh where he says uh love caused the incarnation uh pulling from john 316 and and

that's what john john 316 tells us is that the motivation behind the incarnation is the love of god and therefore the motivation behind the the cross and reconciliation redempt all of redempted history the motivation behind that is the love of god we've talked about this before but um i don't think that you can talk about it too much that that's that's what that says god loved the world and he did this that that love is the reason we know that god loves us for sure not to be 40 minutes yes we are we are definitely out of time now be sure to go over to itunes and rate and review and subscribe if you haven't done that and we will see you guys next week