Genesis chapter 3 and verse 14.
Let us hear together the Word of God.
And the Lord God said unto the serpent,
Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed
above all cattle and above every beast of
the field.
Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust
shalt thou eat all the days of thy
life.
And I will put enmity between thee and
the woman, and between thy seed and her
seed.
It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.
Unto the woman, he said, I will greatly
multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.
In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and
thy desire shall be to thy husband, and
he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam, he said, Because thou hast
hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and
hast eaten of the tree of which I
commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of
it, cursed is the ground for thy sake.
In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all
the days of thy life.
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth
to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb
of the field.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou
eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.
For out of it was thou taken, for
dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because
she was the mother of all living.
And to Adam also and to his wife
did the Lord God make coats of skins
and clothed them.
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man
is become as one of us, to no
good and evil.
And now, lest he put forth his hand
and take also of the tree of life,
and eat and live for ever, therefore the
Lord God sent him forth from the garden
of Eden to till the ground from whence
he was taken.
So he drove out the man, and he
placed at the east of the garden of
Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way to keep the way of the
tree of life.
And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she
conceived and there came and said, I have
gotten a man from the Lord.
Dear friends, it's a great privilege for me
and a great honor to have the invitation
to return to Everest with to speak to
you again and to bring you once more
the word of our unchangeable God.
I bring with me the warmest greetings from
America.
I cannot recall all the people that told
me to pass on Christian greetings to you.
I think I lost track when Irfan Hughes
said to me, just say hello to everyone
that knows me in Wales.
So I'll take care of that right away.
There are many friends that you have in
America, many that are bound together with you
in the Lord Jesus Christ.
And one of the most beautiful things we
have the privilege of experiencing as speakers as
we move from country to country is to
witness the communion of saints, to hear even
the very same expressions in prayer, the same
scriptures quoted, the same language of the soul.
What a beautiful thing it is.
I believe in the communion of saints and
how wonderful it will be on that great
day when without interruption and division or misunderstanding
or character flaws, the entire redeemed church, which
no man can number, shall throw their crowns
at the foot of the throne and cry
out, worthy is the Lamb of God.
Sometimes in all our religious speaking, we are
prone to forget the most common concepts and
use the most common words without contemplating their
meaning.
I'm thinking of words like grace.
We all speak of grace.
We declare we are saved by grace.
Our hope is in grace.
But do you ever think about what grace
means?
That came to me afresh when I was
visiting an aged parishioner.
I noticed that her little room in a
nursing home had been greatly curtailed from her
former home and she had only one thing
hanging on the wall on the other side
of her bed, a 3x5 index card.
My curiosity was aroused and I said, what
do you have on that card?
Well, she said, Pastor, you can go around
my bed and see.
She said, what I have on that card
is my life.
She had the word grace written as an
acrostic, vertically, just the word spelled out behind
it, God's riches at Christ's expense.
I let those words sink in.
I'm sure that's not the full meaning of
grace, but it's a good part of the
meaning of grace.
And I had a new refreshing sight of
the depths of that glorious word, grace.
Well, I think another word like that is
the word faith.
We speak of faith.
We know that without faith it is impossible
to please God.
We know that faith is the core and
the foundation of daily Christian living.
But what is faith?
Twenty-nine years ago this week, I was
packing my belongings in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to move
to Ontario to begin studies in our little
private denominational seminary as the only student under
a local pastor.
And when I arrived, the pastor wanted to
know my theological level of knowledge and my
writing ability.
So he said to me, let me give
you an assignment right at the start.
You can do it in two pages, perhaps
five, no more than ten.
What is faith?
I thought that's not so difficult.
I've been thinking about faith all my life,
hopefully living it for many years.
I went home and I rolled up my
sleeves and I began to work.
You come with me now and you write
the assignment with me a moment.
What is faith?
Well, I thought first perhaps I should go
to the original language and work off of
the Old Testament words, three major Old Testament
words, as your pastors will know, for faith,
most of which mean to lean on and
to rest in.
I could turn to the New Testament word,
pistis, a great word, the word of the
Christian faith, used more than 500 times in
the New Testament and describe what it means
to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Or I thought I could perhaps work off
of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
Many of you know that answer well.
Faith is a saving grace whereby we receive
and rest upon Christ alone for salvation as
he is offered to us in the Gospel.
What a wonderful framework that would be for
describing faith.
Or I thought maybe I could use the
classic reform definition of faith in its exercises
in three distinct acts.
Saving knowledge is involved in faith.
Saving assent and saving trust.
Saving knowledge is a wonderful thing to develop
where I could explain in my paper that
you don't just believe with your mind, but
you believe with all your heart and you
taste it and you digest it.
Like the old illustration given by Herman Hoeksema
that two men sat down in front of
a piece of pizza and one man couldn't
eat of it because he had stomach cancer,
but he was a nutritionist.
He knew all the nutrients in it.
And the other man knew very little.
He saw there was cheese and pepperoni.
Well, but he ate it and he tasted
it.
He digested it.
Which man really enjoyed the pizza?
Hoeksema said, well, of course, the man who
tasted it.
I could work off of that.
Saving knowledge and saving assent.
Agreement.
Agreement with who God is and all his
splendorous majesty and his Christocentricity through the Word
of God.
I could glorify the Father and the Son
and the Spirit.
I could say with Samuel Rutherford, I know
not which divine person I love the most,
but this I know.
I need to know them all and love
them all and cherish them all.
And I would agree, too.
That's part of faith, isn't it?
Agreeing with who I am, a bankrupt sinner,
a poor, needy sinner who lives out of
Jesus Christ, out of a triune God, a
heavenly Father, a redeeming Son, a sanctifying Spirit.
All that beautiful saving assent to agree with
who God is and to agree with who
I am.
And, of course, saving trust, the very heart
of faith.
Putting all my confidence in God.
Putting all my marbles in one basket.
Trusting in Christ alone and in Christ supremely
for salvation.
That would make a wonderful way to describe
faith.
I thought there's got to be more.
Maybe I should look at the four kinds
of faith from the Reformed perspective and discern
true faith from false faith.
Look at historical faith in the mind, an
outward belief in the Word of God, or
miraculous faith, belief that something special is going
to be done to me or upon me
or by me.
Or look at temporary faith, which seems to
rejoice in God for a season, but lacking
root and lacking true humility, lacking genuine Christocentricity,
returns back to the world in a day
of persecution.
And then I could set forth saving faith,
that it endures and is strengthened under trial.
You're coming along with me, aren't you?
And you're thinking perhaps in your own mind
of different ways to describe faith.
But when I tried all these ways, I
began to realize that faith is something far
more rich and far more comprehensive than all
my theological language.
It's something as abrasive as life itself.
Faith is the heart of our relationship to
God.
Faith is the constant, central characteristic of the
regenerate person.
We live by faith, the Apostle says.
And that faith flows from the heart.
That faith is the focal point of my
very spiritual existence.
And it's the root springing cause of all
the activity of the believer's entire being.
And none of my theological language can get
my arms around the breadth and the depth
and the height of this glorious thing we
call faith.
Faith is the activity of the entire heart,
the entire life.
It's as broad as it is deep.
It embraces the weighty matters of personal salvation
and the nitty-gritty details of daily living.
Without faith, you see, I cannot eat or
drink or do all that I do to
the glory of God.
Without faith, I am always sinning.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
And then I found John Kelvin.
Kelvin says something like this.
Faith is inseparable from Christian liberty.
It's inseparable from prayer, from peace, from hope,
from love, from repentance, from self-denial.
Faith must address the hard questions of life,
questions of affliction, loneliness, despair, and cross providences,
and numbing trials.
And faith is the heartbeat, isn't it, of
evangelism and missiology.
It's the presuppositional basis to my world-life
view.
Faith encompasses all that I am.
And faith leads me to that grand and
glorious vision of the Christian life.
For from Him and through Him and to
Him are all things.
To Him be the glory forever.
You can't believe that without faith.
You can't live that without faith.
You see, faith is the heart of my
relationship to God.
It's the heart of life itself.
It's the heart of all my theology, and
especially my soteriology.
You can't have repentance without faith.
They're two sides of one coin.
You can't believe without repenting.
Every act of faith, we believingly repent and
we penitently believe.
I can't break with sin without faith.
Not from the heart.
I can't understand the law without faith, and
its demands, and its spirituality, and the joy
of walking in the ways of God.
I can't understand the gospel without faith.
I can't understand justification without faith.
I receive it only by faith.
I can't be sanctified without faith.
Nothing will work for good in my heart
without believing in God.
I can't go on rejoicing in the indwelling
spirit without faith.
I can't feel the seal of that spirit
in my inward being.
For Paul says, in whom having believed, ye
were sealed with the spirit of promise.
And faith is the principle behind all my
truly good works.
Faith works through love.
Galatians 5.6. And faith is the necessary
condition of all the efficacy of grace.
Grace is never efficacious apart from faith.
Faith is never in competition with grace.
Soul of fide and soul of gratia walk
hand in hand through the pastures of the
word of God.
Worshipping, adoring, glorifying God.
Faith is strengthened by the word, by the
sacraments.
You see, all of theology, the whole field
of systematic theology is a field of faith.
Well, now you understand that I spent 40
or 50 hours on this assignment before I
wrote one sentence.
Faith is so big and so broad.
And yet everything I had done left me
unsatisfied.
Somehow it was still all too abstract.
And I began to search the scriptures.
How does the Bible describe faith?
And of course I came across Hebrews 11,
the great heroes of faith chapter.
And I saw there how the author to
the Hebrews handles faith, how he uses it
for the Hebrew Christians who strengthen them when
they were discouraged under persecution.
Taking biblical portraits of faith and laying them
before the Hebrew Christians and showing from each
portrait one or two dimensions of faith that
are operative in the life of the believer.
And so bit by bit unfolding the richness
of the character of faith by faith Abel,
by faith Enoch, by faith Abraham.
And then I began to think this is
the way.
You can only understand faith through living biblical
portraits, through faith operative by the Spirit in
the lives of fallen sinners like we.
And when I understood that, I began to
have some breakthrough.
And dear friends, I want to bring you
something of that breakthrough in these four lectures,
these four sermons this week.
What I'd like to do is I'd like
to look with you at four aspects of
faith as they operate in the life of
one particular biblical character.
And I would like to look at those
biblical characters with you from outside of the
Hall of Fame or the Hall of Faith
in Hebrews 11.
Characters that are often forgotten in the Bible
and yet characters who have so much to
teach us.
And as we look at these four characters
and these four particular aspects of faith and
I've chosen them carefully, I hope for aspects
that I believe the Church of Jesus Christ
sorely needs today.
As we look at these, would you please
ask yourself three questions and I will do
it to myself as well.
First of all, do I have this kind
of faith at all?
We need to be honest with ourselves.
Do we have saving faith at all?
Secondly, am I exercising the particular aspect of
that faith that is being expounded on that
particular morning?
And thirdly, and most importantly, how can the
example of the particular aspect of this particular
person's faith that is highlighted in Scripture as
we will see them be used in my
life to mature me in the most holy
faith?
Those are the great questions.
And I pray, God, that the Holy Spirit
will richly bless these talks, that you, dear
child of God, may grow in the grace
and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
that at the end of this week, through
these addresses and the other addresses you shall
hear, you may walk out as stalwart sons
and daughters of the Church of Jesus Christ
through faith in our Savior.
Aware, more aware of your own weakness, but
also more aware of the strength of God's
grace through faith in Christ.
And if you are not saved at this
present moment, it is my earnest prayer that
this week you will understand the emptiness of
life without saving faith.
And that you will find that your life
without faith in Christ is like a midnight
darkness.
That's what it is, friends.
Without Christ, we are in darkness.
And we are living in a small world.
You see, young people, Satan comes to you,
doesn't he?
And he says, don't be a Christian.
If you're a Christian, your life will be
restricted.
You'll be in a small world.
The opposite is true.
When I left the United States Army, a
black sergeant came up to me, a very
large black sergeant.
He said this to me, I hope, son,
when you go back out into the world,
you make it out there in that big
world.
I said, well, why do you say that
to me?
Well, he said, because it's a big world
and I'm in the Army and I serve
Uncle Sam.
If you don't know, that's a symbol of
the United States government.
I serve Uncle Sam and my world is
so large because I serve the government and
I've got security.
But you out there in that world all
by yourself, you won't have security.
Oh, I said, my friend, I serve a
bigger being than yours.
My God is the God of the universe
and he will care for me.
He will take care of me.
You see, as a Christian, you don't just
serve yourself.
If you're not a Christian, you've got nothing
bigger in your world than yourself.
And you're tiny, aren't you?
You're a speck of dust.
Have you ever been in a plane and
looked down on people and thought, every little
human being scurrying about in that little car
is a speck of dust?
This God is the God of the universe.
This God has made billions upon billions upon
billions of stars and galaxies.
This God is my God.
You see, my world is so much bigger
because my God has promised that all things
shall work together for good for me, that
I may live to His glory through faith.
And so, faith is the linkage.
Faith is the pipeline.
Faith is the instrument by which I am
hinged together with the great God of the
universe.
And it gives my life breadth and depth
and height and meaning.
My friend, if you're unsaved, your life is
small and restricted.
And if you're a believer, your life is
large because you belong to the heart of
a big God.
There was once a little boy, eight years
old, who was laying on his deathbed.
And his father said to him, Son, aren't
you afraid to die?
He said, No, Dad.
Well, wouldn't you want to stay here with
us for a while, Son?
No, Dad.
Why not?
Well, you see, Dad, when George Whitefield came
to town and I heard him preach and
I heard about his big God, ever since
then I've wanted to go to be with
Whitefield's big God.
You see, it's not only a big God
in this life, but in the life to
come.
Faith has a big God.
And that is what gives the Christian long
-term security.
The Heidelberg Catechism says it so beautifully.
What is your only comfort in life and
in death?
Life and death.
One breath.
You see, all the comforts you put, you
believe in in this world, my dear unconverted
friend, every comfort you trust in, every comfort
you put your faith in is only a
this life comfort.
But the Christian has a life-death-eternity
comfort.
And it's one comfort that is good for
this life, that is good for death, that
is good for eternity, that is good for
every situation, forever and ever is, as the
Catechism says, that I don't belong to myself,
but I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus
Christ, who with His precious blood has died
for me and who sits at the right
hand of the Father to live for me
and to Lord Himself over my life so
that He may prepare me, to bring me,
to be with Him where He is.
Well, in these sessions, then, we want to
look at this big God through the lens
of faith and we want to ask ourselves
how this faith is operating in our lives.
This morning, I want to look with you
at the faith, briefly, of Adam and Eve.
Adam and Eve, who make the first confession
of faith in all of Scripture.
I want to look with you, especially at
verses 20, 21, and Genesis 4, verse 1.
Let me read those three verses again.
20, 21, and 4, 1.
And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because
she was the mother of all living.
Unto Adam also and to his wife did
the Lord God make coats of skins and
clothe them.
And 4, 1.
And Adam knew his wife Eve, and she
conceived in Berkean and said, I have gotten
a man from the Lord.
Adam called his wife's name Eve.
Well, I want to look with you, then,
first at Adam's faith and then at Eve's
faith.
And our focal point this morning will be
on the simplicity and the childlike character, the
simplicity and the childlike character of their trust
in the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I say to you this morning that
these opening words of our text are some
of the most remarkable in all of Scripture.
Adam called his wife's name Eve.
Why do you say that's remarkable?
Well, I say it's remarkable because of the
tremendous contrast between that and the previous verse.
Verse 19 reads, In the sweat of thy
face shalt thou eat bread, this is God
speaking to Adam and Eve, till thou return
unto the ground, for out of it was
thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return.
And Adam said, Eve, Eve, you know what
Eve means in Hebrew?
Ahawa.
Ahawa means life, life giver, living.
So God says, you will die.
And right on the heels of that pronounced
death sentence, Adam turns to his wife and
says, Eve, life.
I don't know if you've ever talked with
people and got the feeling after you said
something to them, they turned around and said
exactly the opposite.
And you said, I guess they didn't hear
me at all.
Donald Gray Barnhouse wrote once someplace that his
children would often turn on the radio and
flick to different stations.
And he said one time they were turning
to a station right when some royalty was
getting married and they were being pronounced husband
and wife.
And the question was, do you hereby take
so and so to be your wedded wife?
And the child turned the station and the
next thing that came on the station was
now go get in your corners and come
out and fight.
And Barnhouse said, that's like Genesis 3, 19
and 20.
The contrast is stupendous.
God says you will die.
And it's as if Adam doesn't hear him.
And he turns to his wife and says,
living.
And what's more astonishing is God doesn't tap
Adam on the shoulder and say, Adam, didn't
you hear me?
He doesn't bawl Adam out.
He doesn't correct him.
What's going on here?
Adam's boldness is unrebuked.
He hears God's death sentence and he pronounces
his life.
Well, Adam also heard Genesis 3, 15.
Thanks be to God.
Where God said in the presence of Adam
to the serpent and I will put enmity
between the serpent and all your ungodly seed
serpent and the woman and her seed.
That's your wife, Adam, and all the godly
seed that will come from her between thy
seed, Satan and her seed, the seed of
the woman, it and suddenly God turns into
a singular tense and says it the seed.
There will be one coming from the woman's
seed that shall bruise thy head, Satan, crushing
it to death and thou, Satan, shall do
no more than bruise the heel of the
seed.
Now, heel bruising is still serious, but it's
not fatal.
So Adam hears this death sentence in verse
19, but he also hears a life sentence,
a remedy, a way out in verse 15.
And facing imminent death because of his sin,
he professes simple childlike faith in the life
sentence of God through the seed of the
woman.
And seeing that God will bring life to
the seed of the woman, he turns to
the woman and he says to her, your
name shall be Eve, life giver for through
your loins, how I don't know, but through
your loins, God will bring forth a Messiah.
Now, I wonder if you experientially know in
your own heart something of this cry, Eve,
life, life in the midst of death.
When God the Holy Ghost has entered my
life and persuaded me that I deserve to
die, that I'm dust, sinful dust, and I
must return to dust again and then throws
open the remedy of the gospel for me
and I believe in it by grace, I
receive it and repose in it and rest
in it and clasp it and embrace it.
It's as if I confess with Adam, Eve,
there is life in Jesus Christ.
Many years ago in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey,
I preached a sermon on Genesis 320.
There was an old janitor in that church
who was 71 years old.
He had struggled for 20 some years to
come to liberty in the gospel.
That morning, his hearing aids didn't work.
And he tried the hearing set of the
church and he couldn't get it to work
either.
And he didn't hear one word I was
saying all through the preliminaries and the prayer
and the singing.
And I got to the sermon.
I announced my text.
He didn't hear anything.
He was fiddling around with his hearing aid.
And suddenly it came on.
And the first words he heard me say
were these, Eve, there is life in the
second Adam, Jesus Christ, for sinners who are
on the way to death and hell.
And the Spirit used that one statement.
Penetrated that man's heart.
And he broke down.
And he left church.
And he came to see me on Monday.
He said, there is life for me in
the Lord Jesus through the promised seed.
Well, in one way or another, perhaps not
that dramatically, perhaps not that suddenly, perhaps more
gradually, but surely every believer knows the simplicity
of this faith.
Learning to trust God in his life-giving
Messiah simply and sincerely.
When my dad was nearing his death, he
had an aneurysm surgery.
And on the bed of his sickness, before
he went into surgery, he gathered the family
around to say farewell in case the Lord
took him.
And he spoke to each one of us.
And I'll never forget what he said to
me.
He said, Son, please preach the simplicity of
the Gospel.
It's so simple.
Adam had one promise.
Faith, though it be, and he believed God.
And God counted it to him for righteousness.
We have thousands of promises.
Do we believe God?
Promises for sinners.
For sinners exactly like you and me.
The Gospel fits every one of us, friends,
if we could see ourselves.
The way a glove fits your hand, it's
exactly suited for what you need.
Eve, have you ever cried that out?
There is life in Jesus Christ.
There is life in the promises.
Life abundant.
You see, we have so many promises, as
I said.
Last night I was telling a story to
a few little boys about white sheets.
There was once a prodigal son who went
away into a far country, just like the
prodigal.
And he repented, just like the prodigal.
And he wrote a letter back to his
dad.
And he said, Dad and Mom, I'll be
coming on a train through your backyard.
A train track went right through their backyard.
And he said, as I come around the
corner on that train, I would love to
stop and see you, but I know I
don't deserve to come home again.
But if, when I come around that corner,
you put one white sheet out on the
line, I'll jump off the train and I'll
come home.
But if you don't want me home, which
I'll understand, don't put any white sheets out.
And when the train came around the corner,
the young man didn't know what he saw.
Every line had a white sheet.
Every bush had a white sheet covering it.
There were white sheets on the garage, white
sheets on the roof, white sheets in the
trees, white sheets everywhere.
Welcome home, son!
And you see, that's the kind of heart
God has.
He's the heart of the Father who ran
to meet the prodigal.
Ran with eyes of mercy, seeing him afar
off.
Ran with feet of mercy, running to meet
him.
Ran with lips of mercy, kissing him everywhere.
Ran with arms of mercy, embracing him.
Ran with tears of mercy, falling upon his
young boy.
He says, bring forth the fatted calf and
slay it, and put a robe on the
son, and put a ring on his finger,
a sign of sonship, and shoes on his
feet, the seal of sonship.
For this my son was lost and is
found.
He is alive by grace.
Oh, my dear unconverted friend, dear unconverted young
person who may be prodigalizing away from home,
welcome home.
Come back.
Not just to your father and mother, but
to the heart of God, to the white
sheets of the promises of Scripture.
He will welcome you home.
He's never turned away one sinner who's come
to Him yet.
He who cometh to Me, I will in
no wise cast out.
If Adam can believe one faint, rather confusing
promise when we read it the first time,
so you ought to be able, by God's
grace, to believe in a thousand, ten thousand
promises in the Holy Scriptures.
Eve.
That was the second name that Adam gave
his wife, wasn't it?
You remember the first name was back in
chapter 2.
He called her woman.
And woman because she was taken out of
man.
Genesis 2, verse 23.
Someone has called that Adam's wedding song.
And it is.
It's kind of a wedding song.
In Hebrew, it's done in poetic form.
He turned to his wife and he said,
you are woman because you are taken out
of man.
You are part of me.
You are my flesh and blood.
These two shall be one flesh.
This is a beautiful wedding song.
And joyfully, Adam embraces his God-given helpmate,
doesn't he?
But sin interrupts.
Sin spoils the first marriage.
Sin threatens to wreak havoc of that relationship
altogether.
Once they both ate of the fruit, Adam
pretended like he didn't even know his wife.
He pushed her away.
He was no longer intimate with her.
They were no longer best friends.
He turned with a kind of disrepute and
a kind of disparaging comment about her to
God, even disparaging God himself.
He says, the woman, the woman.
He uses his wedding song name.
The woman, thou gavest to be with me.
She gave me of the tree.
And then rather meekly, and I did eat.
You see, things are in disrepair.
Continue that way.
Adam and Eve are going to be divorced.
They're headed for the divorce court.
The first marriage about to break up.
But God comes and God intervenes in this
disaster.
And God says there is another seed to
come.
And through this seed, Adam and Eve, you
will regain your intimacy because I will put
enmity.
I will do it.
I will put enmity between you, Adam and
Eve and your seed, your godly seed.
I'll put enmity between you and the serpent
and the ungodly.
So God restores.
God undoes what Adam had undone.
God interrupts that new league of friendship he
made with Satan.
God turns it around and re-covenants Adam
to himself.
Through his promise.
And so Adam gives his wife a second
name.
The second name is a song of faith.
It's a song of faith, you see, because
faith is the evidence of things not seen.
Adam didn't see the Messiah.
But simply, with childlike trust, he believes the
promise.
He says, your name shall be Eve.
I see in you, Eve, the divine promise
will be realized.
Life will proceed from your womb.
God will carry out his purpose through our
seed.
And that seed will include a deliverer who
will bruise, fatally, the head of the serpent.
And so I see in you, my dear
wife, I see in you the pledge of
divine forgiveness and divine salvation and divine love.
Your name is Eve.
You know what amazes me most of all
about Adam's simple faith here?
Is that he doesn't offer God any ifs
or ands or buts or hows.
And I'm always doing that with God.
I say that to my shame.
I've had times where I sat at my
study desk and I actually pounded my fist
on the table in anger against myself and
said, why don't I trust thee, Lord?
Why these ifs and these ands and these
buts?
Why not a simple childlike faith?
Hast thou not said, all things work together
for good to them that love thee?
Why can't I believe it?
You struggle like that too sometimes.
Well, let Adam be your mentor here.
No ifs.
No buts.
No how will you do it, Lord?
Simply believing what God has said.
I will put enmity.
Adam, you won't have to do nothing but
receive what I say.
Faith comes by hearing.
You've heard.
Adam's heard.
He's believed.
He doesn't even ask for a sign.
He's not even a Gideon.
He just believes.
You see, and that's the character of faith.
That's what saving faith is all about.
Saving faith cannot doubt.
Saving faith believes in God.
Saving faith surrenders into the evangel, into the
arms of God in the Gospel.
Reposing in Christ.
Clasping Christ.
Trusting in Christ.
Luther put it this way.
He said, faith is the ring that clasps
Jesus Christ who is the diamond.
That's what faith is like.
And so faith draws no attention to itself,
does it?
Our purpose in these four discussions these mornings
is not to draw attention to faith itself,
but to use the characteristics of faith to
bring the full spotlight upon our precious Savior
who gives us by faith to live out
of Him.
That's the point of faith.
I'm not sure if you young men in
Wales give your fiancées engagement rings when you
are prepared to marry them, but in America
that's always done.
And when the fiancée gets her ring, she
shows it off proudly.
And she doesn't do one of these, look
at my ring.
She does one of these, look at my
diamond.
You see, that's what faith does.
Adam believes the promise of the Messiah.
He gazes upon the diamond of God's promises.
When he sees the luster of the diamond,
he loses his ifs and hows and buts.
Just as when the bride looks at her
diamond, the bride-to-be, she says, yes,
my fiancée loves me.
Because this diamond seals his love.
Jesus Christ is God's seal of love.
And so Adam comes in all simplicity.
He says as it were, though he didn't
know the words, nothing in my hand I
bring.
Simply to thy promise I cling.
Naked, come to thee for dress.
Helpless, look to thee for grace.
Foul, I to the promise fly.
Wash me, Savior, or I die.
Adam's faith puts so many of us to
shame, doesn't it?
Puts us to shame.
One promise, a rather vague one about a
coming Deliverer, so little detail.
We understand it so much better having the
full Bible.
And yet he says, Eve, Eve, there is
life.
Is there someone sitting here this morning that
is saying to himself, even this moment, but
can God look upon me?
That's Adam.
But what about me?
Could God ever look upon me?
Such a sinner.
You don't know the sins I have in
my closet.
You don't know how old I am in
sin.
How hard I am in sin.
How severely I have sinned.
How I've cast away the Gospel invitations.
How I've dirtied those white sheets of promises
with all my iniquity.
Surely God won't have mercy on me.
You're wrong, my friend.
You're dead wrong.
This is a faithful saying, worthy to be
accepted by all, that Christ Jesus came into
the world to save sinners.
That's what you are.
That's what I am.
To save sinners, Paul says, of whom I
am chief.
Can you get beyond the word chief?
Yet there is room for you, for you.
For you, for everyone.
There's room.
No one is excluded.
And if you think you're so unworthy that
God would never have mercy upon you, I'll
tell you something, my friend.
Adam was even more unworthy.
In some ways, Adam was the greatest sinner
that ever lived.
He plunged the whole human race into chaos
and sin and division and destruction.
All the sin you see in the world
around you is the guilt of Adam still
today.
You know, I once read of a remarkable
dream of Hugh MacPhail, a Scottish preacher who
came into strange and great darkness on his
deathbed.
No one could comfort him.
Dr. James Kennedy came from afar to comfort
him.
His elders tried to comfort him.
His ministers in the neighboring vicinity tried to
comfort him.
His wife tried to comfort him.
Children, nothing worked.
And one night, Hugh MacPhail had a dream.
And in the dream, he heard music.
And he saw large golden gates, like the
gates of heaven.
And when he heard music coming from the
left side, he saw Old Testament saints, Moses,
Abraham, David, walking along.
And the gates went open.
And the music played.
And the people walked in.
And just as the Old Testament saints walked
in, the voice said to him in his
dream, Hugh MacPhail, can you go in with
them?
Can you go in with a David who
committed adultery and murder?
Can you go in with Moses who struck
the rock?
And a whole list of things.
And Hugh MacPhail said, Oh, no, Lord, I'm
a greater sinner than them all.
There's no room for me.
And the gates shut.
And in his dream, he got near despair.
But then he heard music again.
And along came the New Testament saints.
Along came Denying Peter and Doubting Thomas.
And the gates again went open.
The question came again.
And again, Hugh MacPhail said, No, Lord, I'm
a greater sinner than them all.
Then came the ancient church fathers, the reformers,
Scottish covenanters.
He couldn't go in with any of them.
And then came along his own elders and
the people in his church.
He knew all their faults and weaknesses and
their sin and their besetting sins.
He pastored them.
And the gates went open.
And the voice said, Can't you go in
with them, Hugh MacPhail?
He said, No, Lord, I'm a greater sinner
than them all.
Finally, there was one lone individual that came.
And the music stopped.
And an old man came hobbling along.
And Hugh MacPhail's heart began to pound.
And he thought, Is the gates going to
go open for this man?
And before the voice came, he said, Who
is he, Lord?
Who is he?
And the voice said, Hugh MacPhail, this is
Manasseh, who has filled the streets of Jerusalem.
From one corner to the other with the
blood of the saints.
Can you go in with him?
And he awoke from his dream.
And we don't believe divine revelation through dreams.
We have the full scripture.
But God can, on rare occasions, apply a
dream after we awake with scriptural truth.
And as he meditated on that dream, he
realized that there was room for the greatest
of sinners.
He called his wife.
He said, Go call Dr. Kennedy.
Go call the ministers.
Tell them if there's room for Manasseh, there's
room for old Hugh MacPhail in the gates
of heaven.
But I say to you this morning, friend,
that if in his dream it had been
Adam, it would have made even more sense
because the blood of all ages rests upon
Adam.
And if Adam could believe with simple faith
in the simple promise of God, do you
not have a warrant also so to believe?
Why are you not believing?
Or rather, what are you believing in?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus will do
for you.
Your sin is too crimson.
The dye in the wool is too great.
You need the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.
Well, Eve also had sinned.
And she had sinned first, Paul says.
And she had turned out to be a
bad helpmate, a bad wife.
She had interrupted marital harmony.
She destroyed the innocence of the garden.
She was involved in the imputed guilt to
mankind, not as a covenant head, but as
one who tempted the covenant head, Adam, to
fall.
What could Eve expect?
She could only expect at best that she
was to become the mother of sinners living
under the death sentence if she were to
be a mother at all.
She was condemnable.
It seemed there was no future for Eve
but a painful, miserable motherhood.
In pain you shall bring forth children.
And you women know how much pain it
is to have a child.
God wasn't lying.
It's no fun to go through that pain.
But what did Eve have but pain for
her future, for everything?
Who could restore her relationship with Adam?
Who could give her obedient children?
Who could give her restoration with God?
But suddenly, there in the garden, Adam turns
to her and says, Eve, there is life.
And Eve receives that promise and believes the
name, the song of faith that Adam sings,
believes her own name.
How do we know that?
Well, we know that from chapter 4, verse
1.
And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she
conceived and bare can and said, I have
gotten, in the original Hebrew, the man from
the Lord.
Here he is, the promisee.
That's what she said.
This is the Messiah.
This is the one who will deliver us.
She believes, you see.
So she was obviously in a frame of
faith.
She obviously believed that promise along with Adam.
So when Adam gave her that name, she
celebrated with him and when she received her
first child, she believed that the promise of
God was on its way.
Yes, that it had arrived.
And so when Adam calls his wife's name
Eve, there is little doubt that a new
life expectancy surges through the breast of this
woman who committed the very first sin.
And new hope arises out of the darkness
of guilt and sin that is focused on
the promised seed.
And the tie that now binds Adam and
Eve together is stronger than ever before.
Because it's a tie in the Lord Jesus.
Adam and Eve find each other back in
the promise.
Dear young people, may I just say to
you one sentence.
When you look for a helpmate in life,
let that be your number one priority.
Look for a partner with whom you have
a common bond in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Because that time will last forever.
Beauty, external beauty will fade.
Internal beauty will abide forever.
Adam and Eve receive a new cement.
Their marriage is cemented by the blood of
Jesus, the promised seed.
And they are bound together inseparably through faith
in Christ.
And God knows they needed that faith, for
they were soon expelled from paradise.
And soon it became true.
Thorns and thistles, Adam, you will face in
your hard work.
And Eve, you will experience the pain of
childbearing.
And perhaps even more pain in childrearing.
The challenges.
A mother goes through in this sinful world.
Rearing children are unspeakable.
How will Eve get through?
How will Adam sustain his hot labor?
Well, they are cemented through faith in Jesus.
But now simple, childlike faith always gets tested,
doesn't it?
God delights to test His people, to strengthen
them in the simplicity and the childlikeness of
their faith.
Cain doesn't prove to be that sinless Messiah.
He's a naughty boy.
He goes the wrong way.
He does things his parents don't want him
to do.
He says things they don't want him to
say.
He's got an anger.
He's got temper in him.
What a disappointment.
Where's the promise?
Is this the man?
This naughty boy, is this the man from
the Lord?
What of God's promise?
And then the staggering deep waters of cruel
murder.
Oh, my friend, what Adam and Eve went
through.
They were so disappointed with Cain that when
Abel came along, they named him Abel, which
means vanity, emptiness, transitoryness.
Their expectation, the breadth of their expectation was
almost knocked out of them.
But they named their boy Abel.
Their faith had not died.
We know that.
But their faith must have come to a
low ebb.
Surely they must have struggled when they dealt
with Cain as a young boy with things
like David struggled with in Psalm 42 and
43.
Where is thy God, the scoffers say.
Such a boy.
Such a promise.
How can you bring God's providence and God's
promise together?
You know that struggle in your life.
Providence of God seeming to cross lines with
the promises of God.
His name is Abel.
Transitory.
Vanity.
Just a breadth.
They're in the dark tunnel of doubt.
But it gets worse before it gets better.
Cain rises up and he slays his brother
Abel.
You know that, boys and girls.
You know the story.
He kills his own brother.
Can't you see Adam and Eve?
You can hardly resist imagining sitting together in
their living room.
Cain is gone.
They don't know where he is.
He's a vagabond wandering somewhere.
They've lost him.
And they have to bury their other son.
Suddenly they have no children.
With the promise of the strange seed.
And no children at all.
Oh God, what of thy promise?
Adam.
In their better moments, Adam, it's all our
own fault.
We sin in the garden.
Yes, Eve, it's our own fault.
Let's get down on our knees, my dear
wife.
Let's cry to God for mercy.
Is there yet hope?
Is there yet a way in this impossible
promise?
Is there a way out of this dark
tunnel of doubt?
And Eve becomes pregnant again.
What happened?
We don't know all what happened.
But we do know this, that faith had
been revived.
God's people had their ups and downs in
their seasons of faith.
Oh yes.
But faith was revived.
And by the time Seth was born, Eve
says, his name is Seth.
Restitution.
God is restoring what he has taken away.
God's promise is not death.
They still believe the simple, naked promise of
God.
And they live 900 some years.
Adam 930.
Can you imagine how many generations of children,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, great-great
-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren they saw?
And talking to them all, telling them about
the fall, telling them about the promise, and
then seeing before their very eyes two lines,
two seeds, developing the seed of Cain to
seven generations, climaxing in that ungodly Lamech who
would kill people out of mere pleasure, and
the seven lines of generation coming to the
number of fullness in the godly seed, climaxing
in Enoch who walked with God and was
taken.
And they saw in the godly seed that
God from generation to generation was fulfilling His
promises.
And dear friend, if you have a child
or a grandchild tonight who is walking in
the ways of God, you have a visible
picture of the promises of God and Jesus
being fulfilled before your eyes.
Praise be the Lord.
And so Eve and Adam began to see
more and more of God's promises being fulfilled,
not knowing it will still be 4,000
some years before Jesus Christ is born, but
living out of the promise, not staggering in
the midst of adversity.
Now finally, God does one more thing in
this chapter to help Adam and Eve throughout
these long centuries of living by faith.
And you can find that in verse 21.
Unto God, unto Adam also, and to his
wife did the Lord God make coats of
skins and clothe them.
God gave them the verbal promise in verse
15, and He gave them the visible confirmation,
much like we would have today in a
sacrament in verse 21.
Here God visualizes the gospel.
Have you ever stopped to think how Adam
and Eve must have felt when God took
animals, perhaps lambs, we don't know, and killed
them before their very eyes.
There had been no death in all of
Eden until that moment.
Physical death.
Recently, I was in Brazil and we were
driving down a highway.
You know, we get so used to seeing
animals, small animals here in America, deer, laying
on the side of the road.
We think nothing of it.
We just try to avoid them.
But it struck me.
There was a large horse on the side
of the highway.
Killed.
A horse.
There were vultures on top of the horse,
eating the flesh.
What a picture of what we deserve.
What a picture of the fruit of sin.
Don't you think Adam and Eve felt that
way?
God killed animals before them.
They loved God's creation.
They were the keepers of that creation.
And God kills and sheds blood.
This is no mere daily act of God.
This is a solemn moment in the lives
of Adam and Eve.
And they cannot fail to understand the message
that without the shedding of blood there is
no remission of sin.
And we know they taught that to their
children, no doubt, because Abel came with blood
and Cain did not.
And Cain knew better.
And he wanted to come in a bloodless
way before God.
So this was God's picture of the Gospel.
God was telling them, I will bring that
seed through to your salvation somehow through a
way of blood.
Adam and Eve, your blood will not do.
You cannot save yourself, but I will save
you through the seed from the woman through
a way of blood.
So what does God do?
God strips away all their fig leaves.
He strips away their fig leaf righteousness and
their filthy, ragged righteousness.
And He gives them the white robed righteousness
of His only begotten Son through bloodshed.
My dear friends, as I close this morning,
may I ask if that has happened in
your life also?
Have you lost all your fig leaves, all
your excuses before God, all your piety, all
your repentances?
Have you lost everything that you can adorn
yourself with God before God?
Can you say, Hebrews 4 verse 12, I
have become naked and open before the living
God with whom I have had to do,
and I could not stand before Him, but
only in Jesus' dress, in His blood and
righteousness.
My friend, we have to lose everything.
We have to lose our worthiness.
We have to lose our unworthiness.
We have to lose everything.
You see, there are only two religions in
the world.
There's the religion of fig leaves, religion of
works, or there's the religion of skins, the
religion of bloodshedding, the religion of Christ.
By nature, we all come to God with
our fig leaves.
By nature, we all want to meet God
with a fig leaf religion.
By nature, we all want to stand before
God with our church going and our outward
demeanor and our social graces and our kind
little outward deeds to our neighbor.
We want to come with a clean conscience.
But God says no.
Come as a sinner.
The only true way to come before me
is to come just as you are.
Perhaps you heard of that wonderful story of
a king who called an artist into his
palace and he said, I'm very bored in
this palace.
I'm bored with all the decorations.
I want you to paint me a painting
of something that has never been painted and
erected and hung in a king's palace before.
And the artist went out and found a
poor, filthy, bearded, dirty beggar.
And he said, will you come to my
studio?
I want to paint you.
And the beggar said, yes, I'll come.
Just give me a couple hours.
I'll be right there.
You know the story.
He shaved, he dressed, he got all nice
and clean.
And he came to the painter, the artist.
The artist said, I have no need of
you.
Don't come to God as a Pharisee.
Come to him as a publican.
Come to him as a sinner.
Come to him just as you are.
Lay your fig leaves before him.
Say, Lord, I'm a sinner.
I can't pay for my sins.
I can't be perfect.
I can't meet any of your conditions, Lord.
They can only be met in the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Jesus, thy blood and righteousness, my beauty are,
my glorious dress.
In flaming worlds and these arrayed, the joy
I lift up my head.
Believe, friends, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ
and thou shalt be saved.
Don't rest and don't think you're really alive
until you too can cry out as you
see the gospel.
Eve, life, life outside of me, life in
the man from the Lord, the God-man
from the Lord.
Emmanuel, God with us, the Lord Jesus.
Amen.