In our evening services latterly, we have been
turning over and over again to the first
book of the Bible, the book of Genesis.
And our attempt has been to let Genesis
speak for itself.
It is to stand back, as it were,
and let the thrust of this divine word
reach us and speak to us in the
clarity and the pungency of its own message.
We are well aware of the various kinds
of criticism levelled at this book from one
quarter or another.
But at this point of any rate, we
are evading most of them.
And we are just letting the book speak
for itself.
Now, I'm going to continue that policy tonight
as we turn to yet another important passage
in this very remarkable book.
Now, tonight we are going to look at
the passage that begins with verse 8 and
goes on to verse 19.
What we want to do is just to
get the substance of it, see exactly what
God is saying to us here in the
Scriptures.
Eden has been called a paradise.
And I think that the more we come
to know about Eden before the fall, the
more we appreciate the significance of that term.
It appears to have been a setting of
beauty, a place of joy, almost idyllic.
Of course, we have to be careful here,
because we don't know all that much about
it.
Reading the early part of this Genesis narrative,
I feel very much like the experience one
has had more than once of going into
a room, it's dark, you switch on the
light, and the bulb fuses.
But before the bulb fuses, you've had at
least a good look around to know what's
in the room and you know the way
to go.
Now, there is something of that about the
first two chapters of the book of Genesis.
It gives you a flash of light, blazing
into this early paradise of man's experience.
But then the light goes out.
Paradise is lost.
We remember some of the things, but we
must not read too much into the picture,
not more than the Scripture warrants.
And yet I suggest to you that we
know enough about it to acknowledge the accuracy
of this designation of Eden, before sin entered
as a place of paradise.
But that Edenic paradise was short-lived.
In no time it became a scene of
warfare, that is, warfare against God.
A rebellion started there, that we have already
considered together, when man chose to take his
side against God.
And whatever else we see there, whatever else
Scripture later on tells us took place there,
this we must never forget.
It is clear in the book of Genesis
here, it is clear in chapter 3, that
in Genesis, kingdom became divided against kingdom.
The kingdom of man and the kingdom of
Satan on the one hand, over against the
rule and the kingdom of God.
From that moment on you have the great
division of history, the great division of mankind,
into those who come willingly under the rule
of God and those who remain under the
dominion of the serpent.
That occupies quite a strategic role in Scripture
until we come to the very book of
the Revelation, when we see the end of
this dismal creature.
Now, following upon the serious realignment of forces
described in the first paragraph in chapter 3,
with kingdom set against kingdom, the scene changes.
In the passage that we are looking at
tonight, it resembles more like, it resembles almost
a scene in a court of law.
Gone is the idyllic beauty of a garden,
and in its place that garden becomes a
law scene, a scene depicting a law court.
All the trappings are not here, of course,
especially those that you and I are accustomed
to if we visit law courts.
I hope we don't very much.
But you don't have any of the trappings,
but you have the centerpiece.
You have here a situation where there is
an arraignment of accused persons to answer to
an indictment.
That is followed by the sentencing of the
guilty.
That is the centerpiece in any court of
law.
Now, ere we look at this epochal confrontation,
then, between the Creator and the first pair
of human creatures, it may be wise to
interject with a reminder that God's justice is
not unmixed with mercy.
Tonight, because we can't cover more of the
ground, tonight we shall be listening to the
thunder peals in that ancient paradise.
But we must remember, even as we come
into the storm and listen to the raging
of the divine symptoms, that there is light
that comes even into this dark place.
And in the will of God, that will
occupy us when we meet again.
But tonight we're going to hear the dark
thing that God would have us learn from
this challenging scene in His Word.
Now, there are two main things, then, that
will occupy us tonight.
The first is this.
It's the divine summons to explain what has
happened.
Principles are unchanging in Scripture.
God summoned this first pair to give an
account of themselves.
He'll do exactly the same with you and
with me.
Maybe not yet, though there are times when
He comes very near to us in this
world and demands of us that we acknowledge
and tell Him all about things that we've
been trying to hide.
But one day the trumpet will sound and
the dead shall be raised, and we shall
all be arraigned before the judgment seat of
the Bhima, or the throne of God, to
give account of ourselves.
That principle is written right into the first
book of the Bible.
Man is accountable.
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap.
But even in the reaping, man has to
give an account of himself to God.
Now, that's the first main picture here.
Two subsections of that.
First of all, we see God seeking man
and man hiding from God.
Then we see God questioning man and man
equivocating in reply.
Let's look at these two very briefly.
One, God seeking and man hiding.
Now just cast your thoughts back.
You will agree with me if you do
that this is a most remarkable thing.
If what we have read and what we
have studied thus far is true, then man
is God's own creature and creation.
God brought him to birth.
He was made by the hands of God.
He was made after the image of God.
He was God's own creature.
Why hide from God?
This is exactly what we have here.
The creature is hiding from his creator.
Now if we are really to recapture the
imagery here and the thread here, we are
to imagine God coming into the garden in
the cool of the day and Adam and
Eve hear him coming.
Now you say, surely you don't believe that
kind of thing.
Well, I'm tempted to be involved with some
of the criticisms at that point, at least
to this extent.
Those of you who are really familiar with
the Bible will know that before God became
incarnate in Jesus Christ, before he became manifest
over a period of thirty-three years in
the Lord Jesus, he often manifested himself temporarily
to men.
There is a theological term for this.
People call them theophanies, appearances of God.
God often appeared to men just for a
moment, just to say something or to do
something.
For example, he appeared to Moses in a
bush that burned and was not consumed.
Now that was just a momentary thing.
It didn't happen, it didn't last very long,
but God had something to say to the
man Moses.
In order to say it and to say
it clearly and get the message across, he
became, as it were, involved in a bush
that was burning.
But it was God in the bush.
That's what made it singular.
It was an appearance of God.
Now, you have the same kind of thing.
I'll give one other illustration.
In the temple with the prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah came into the temple one day, and
this day it was so different for him.
In the year that King Uzziah died, he
said, I saw the Lord high and lifted
up on his train, the train of his
garments, fill the temple.
Well, now, there were other people in the
temple that day.
Doubtless they didn't see what Isaiah saw.
But God appeared to Isaiah.
He felt the whole threshold of the temple
moving.
God appeared to him.
There are other such manifestations, such theophanies, quite
a number of them in the Old Testament
and some indeed in the New.
As, for example, when the Holy Spirit comes
down in the form of a dove.
That is a theophany.
The Spirit is Spirit, but the Spirit becomes
into the form of a dove in order
to convey a certain message.
Now, that's the kind of thing we have
here.
God assuming a certain form because he wants
to speak to a man, and he wants
to speak to him directly, face to face,
eyeball to eyeball.
Adam and Eve heard God coming into the
garden in the cool of the day, and
the first thing they did was to run
and hide.
There's something so foolish about this, isn't there?
But behind the folly, will you notice the
tragedy?
They're already wearing fig leaves, as we see
from verse 7, the end of the last
paragraph, because they've become aware of nakedness, their
own nakedness.
They become suddenly uncomfortable, the one in the
presence of the other.
And the way they overcame that was by
sewing fig leaves together because they were very
self-conscious.
But now notice, that wasn't enough.
And so what they do is they run
and hide behind the bushes, behind the trees
of the garden, believing in their crazed stupidity
that a bush can hide from the eyes
of the Almighty.
And yet, is it as stupid as all
that?
My good friend, aren't you sometimes trying to
hide from God?
As if there was something that could come
between you and the penetrating eye of the
Almighty that made you.
You know, there isn't.
Nothing is hid from the eyes of Him
with whom we have to do.
He is all-knowing and His eyes all
-penetrating.
Wear any mask you like.
He sees you.
Whither shall I flee from thy spirit?
Where can I go to and hide from
God?
There is no place.
No hiding place from God.
So Adam and Eve mapped out a pattern
of behavior that all their children in all
the generations have followed.
Something goes wrong and what we do instinctively
is when God is after us we try
to hide.
God-seeking, man-hiding, God-questioning, man-equivocating.
There are two or three questions that God
is insistent upon asking and He must have
the answers to them.
But mark the equivocation here.
Adam, where art thou?
says God.
As if, of course, He didn't know.
You know, there are some questions that are
asked out of knowledge, others out of ignorance.
God's questions are questions that betray His knowledge
rather than His ignorance.
If you are involved in some aspect of
science or art and you ever sit on
a panel and you listen to people asking
questions about your own subject, you know exactly
some people ask questions because they're ignorant.
But other people's questions are asked because they
know.
The very way a question is asked reveals
whether the person who is asking knows or
knows not.
God's questions are asked because He knows and
every question gets to its target.
Adam, where are you?
Well, says Adam furtively, I heard your voice
in the garden and I was afraid because
I was naked.
But then comes the second question.
Who told you that you were naked?
Now, that question sounds stupid to us.
But it wasn't.
It was a question that got right at
the root of the matter.
You see, when Adam and Eve were made,
they were made and they were, they stood
together and they lived together in all the
simplicity of nakedness.
And there was no shame.
There was no self-consciousness.
There was no evil.
There was no impurity in the mind.
All was pure and all was bliss.
There was no self-consciousness whatsoever.
But when sin came, the whole mind was
upset and the whole heart and the imaginations.
And the moment sin came, man and woman
became aware of something wrong and something sinister,
something evil, something impure coming in between them.
They covered one another.
Adam says, I heard your voice in the
garden and I hid.
Why did you hide?
Because I was naked.
Who told you you were naked?
Thus God brings them right to the heart
of the issue.
How did they know?
How had they become aware of the consequences
of their nakedness in this self-consciousness and
sense of guilt?
Says God, asking another question, which brings him
right there.
Did you eat of the fruit I commanded
you not to?
Notice the equivocating pursuing.
Adam, as it were, now looking into the
eyes of God, manifested in some form or
other in the garden, says to him, The
woman whom you gave to be with me,
she gave me the fruit and I ate.
Isn't this the pattern that has been followed
all the way through human life?
The woman whom you gave me, she took
it and she gave me and I ate.
I didn't eat, but yet I did.
The woman.
That was factually true, but it was morally
inadequate as an explanation.
Adam can only blame Eve for giving him
the fruit.
He must blame himself for eating it.
He stands responsible for his own action.
But Mark, that's not the only equivocation that
we have here.
I missed something out.
The woman, says Adam, whom thou gavest to
be with me, she gave me the fruit
and I did eat.
Will you mark that sinister word?
Not just the woman gave me, but the
woman whom you gave me.
What are you doing, Adam?
Shall I tell you?
The language is clear enough for anybody to
see.
What Adam is trying to do is this.
He's trying to blame God for it all.
He says, you gave me this woman to
be my help.
She's the cause of the trouble.
I did nothing.
I only received what she gave me and
you gave her to me.
So you are responsible.
God turns to Eve.
She tried the same approach.
When asked what she had done, she replied,
Oh, she says, the serpent beguiled me and
I ate.
You know, we're tempted to laugh at this,
aren't we?
You see, it's a mirror.
It's exactly what we all do.
We refuse to stand on our own two
feet and to accept our own responsibilities.
We say, society made me do it.
Somebody else made me do it.
Somebody else and somebody else all the time.
When God says, look, man, look, woman, stand
on your own two feet.
You've got to answer me for what you've
done in the flesh.
The serpent beguiled me.
Factually true, but morally inadequate is an explanation.
Eve can only blame the serpent for beguiling
her or putting the notion in her head.
She can only blame herself for choosing to
obey Satan rather than the God who had
commanded her not to eat.
The knowledge which Satan promised has turned out
to be something different from what Adam had
expected.
You shall be as gods.
Do you remember that?
You know, that was really, that was really
the character.
You shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil.
Aha.
What a wonderful thing to know the difference
between good and evil.
We shall be as gods or as God.
But the knowledge that has come to them
of good and evil is the kind of
knowledge that makes them fear and makes them
hide and makes them cringe in the presence
of their Creator.
It's not an objective knowledge of sin, but
it's the knowledge of sin from the inside.
It's the knowledge of sin that comes to
the guilty and the befouled and the fallen
and the condemned.
You know, Satan never, never keeps his word.
There's always a twist.
What he offers you as light may be
darkness by the time you get it.
A summons to judgment.
One day, let me repeat, you and I
will be summoned to explain what we've done
with our lives and to do so to
the same all-knowing God as summoned Adam
and Eve from their hiding place right back
here.
So, if you quibble and if you argue
concerning some of the factual details in the
book of Genesis, at least remember this, the
principles enunciated here are enunciated all through the
Bible and one principle is this, sin is
followed by judgment.
There is no scientific school on earth that
can gainsay that principle.
Now, that brings us to the second main
thread here, the sentence of God, verses fourteen
to nineteen.
The divine sentence.
The first is the summons to court, to
give an account, to be cross-examined.
We've seen that, albeit in brief.
Now we come to hear the thunder crack,
the thunder peals, the sentence of God.
When God and sin meet, there has to
be a sentence.
God cannot remain neutral in the presence of
sin.
This is involved in the biblical portrait of
God, the biblical doctrine of God.
Our God is a moral being and he
simply cannot be neutral in the presence of
sin.
Sooner or later, he has to pass sentence
and to condemn.
And this is what we're going to look
at now for a little time.
Now, there are four things here, two doubles,
two doublets.
The thunder peals we speak of are, in
the first place, two curses.
A curse upon the serpent and a curse
upon the soil.
And then, following that, something that the Bible
doesn't call a curse, but it's condemnation nevertheless.
The condemnation of Eve and the condemnation of
Adam, and in that order.
Now, we must look at these things because
we have something to learn from them.
First of all, we hear God curse the
serpent and then God curse the soil.
I believe that there are some questions that
can only be answered in life by reference
to this passage in the book of Genesis.
God curses the serpent.
Listen to these words.
Because you have done this, cursed are you
above all cattle and above all wild animals.
Now, looking specifically at the serpent now, God
says that he's cursing it.
And there is a two-fold curse that
I want you to notice.
First of all, the curse of humiliation, and
then the curse of isolation.
Upon your belly, says God, you shall go
and dust shall you eat all the days
of your life.
Now, this is addressed directly to the serpent
as a creature.
Henceforth, it shall eat the dust.
Eat the dust.
We have a phrase like that in our
modern English, do we not?
About licking the dust.
Now, that's exactly what it means here.
It has an idiomatic touch about it.
What it means is this, that somehow or
other this creature is to be humiliated, to
slither around on its belly and to eat
of the dust of the ground all the
days of its life, with one other rider
which comes elsewhere in the Old Testament.
Not only is this a token of humiliation,
but of abomination.
I read in Leviticus chapter 11 and verse
42 that whatever goes on its belly you
shall not eat, for such is an abomination
in the sight of God.
Here, then, is the first element of the
divine curse upon this creature that tempted our
first parents.
The curse of humiliation with abomination, and the
second is this, the curse of isolation.
I will put enmity between you and the
woman, and between your seed and her seed.
Now, you notice what that means.
If you put enmity between me and my
wife, then we're separated.
If you put enmity between any two persons,
they're separated.
They're divided.
And God says to this creature, look, He
says, I will put enmity between you and
the serpent, and between your seed and her
seed forever.
Now, I'm going to return to that when
we shall be looking at the joyful note
in this third chapter in the book of
Genesis.
And I'm simply going to leave it there
now.
I just want to refer to it.
The condemnation to be isolated, an isolation which
comes to its consummation in the book of
the Revelation in the Bible.
When Satan is cast into the lake of
fire, and it is left there forever and
ever.
Ultimate, eternal isolation.
The word is given here.
Throughout the history of the church, this is
what is happening in the life of every
godly man, of every Christian man and woman
throughout the ages.
If you're a Christian man, you're becoming more
and more isolated from Satan.
And the holier you become, and the more
Christ-like you become, the greater the chasm,
the greater the gulf between you and this
creature.
Brought our first parents to their knees spiritually
in the garden of Eden.
So then, the curse upon the serpent is
twofold.
The curse of humiliation and the curse of
isolation.
Can I say a word here?
I think that this is a very real
application to anybody who tempts other people to
sin.
Now, it is one thing for a man
or a woman to sin, himself or herself.
But it is quite another thing for a
man to lead other people along with him
into destruction.
And to involve, perhaps, your children or your
friends or someone else that you've only known
for a couple of hours.
Be careful, my friend.
God's curse falls upon the agents of temptation
and seduction.
God's curse upon Satan.
God's curse upon the soil.
Curse it be the ground, says God, because
of you.
But how can the ground be cursed?
Well, let God explain himself.
Let the words say, let it speak for
itself.
What does the book say?
How can the ground be cursed?
Two things.
The cursed ground produces thorns and thistles as
well as other good things.
First part of verse eighteen, Thorns and thistles
it shall bring forth to you.
Now, if we rightly understand the meaning of
what we have been seeing before, Eden seems
to have patterned for what God meant for
the entire human race, human family.
The soil of earth would probably have been
as fertile as the soil of Eden had
man not sinned.
Its beauty and its bounty would have been
extended.
But as we have seen, it happened differently.
And he who was meant to subdue the
earth and have dominion over it as well
as to till a garden, he, man himself,
who was meant to be the viceroy of
all the world, of all the earth, fell
and became enemy of God, an enemy of
God.
Now, in consequence of that, the soil will
not willingly yield its crops.
To a man who has taken his stand
against the Creator, there is a curse upon
the soil in virtue of which it will
yield thorns and thistles when you have not
sown any.
There is a threat and a shadow of
death that will harass man right here in
trying to procure a livelihood from the earth.
Of course, he will sow the seed in
the soil and he will get some benefit.
He will reap some harvest.
When we go on further into the book
of Genesis, we have the law of the
harvest and the promises of God and the
covenant of God at the time of Noah.
But at this point, God says, whatever else
will emerge out of the soil, you will
have a crop, you will have sufficient.
But along with that, there will be this
other sinister thing, something that will hurt your
hand and prick your fingers and something that
will choke the good in the soil.
And it will be like trying to work
against the clock.
Now, will you please notice what this is?
God is bringing death and the shadow of
death even to a workaday world.
He is telling Adam, look, it is going
to cost you to live from now on.
The earth is not willingly going to yield
to you the food you need.
You ate the fruit of the tree that
I commanded you not to.
You are not going to find it all
that easy to live having disobeyed me.
The sentence is not unrelated to the sin
that had occasioned it.
He who ate of the divinely forbidden tree
will find it a battle to produce his
means of sustenance.
Cursed be the ground.
The ground produces thorns and thistles, and the
cursed ground which produces thorns and thistles will
only produce food with toil.
Now, if you were able to read the
first book of the Bible in the language
it was written, you will notice that there
is a distinctive challenge here.
The language is very clear and hits you
between the eye.
In toil you shall eat of it all
the days of your life.
In the sweat of your face, literally the
sweat of your nostrils, you shall eat bread.
You shall eat bread.
Yes, there is grace even here.
There is mercy even here.
You shall starve.
But by the sweat of your brow, by
the toil of your hands and of your
body, it will be hard going, says God.
Yes, judgment is tinctured with mercy.
More so than we can properly assess just
now.
He shall have bread, but work has become
toil.
Now, mark that change.
God instituted work as something that was good
for man before the fall.
I find that there are very few people
that really note this today.
And it's something that needs to be preached
in almost every corner.
Work was meant for man.
Man was meant to work.
God ordained it as something that was good
for man, and it's not the consequence of
man's fall.
But because of the fall, some work has
become something different.
It's become toil.
It's become a battle with the elements, if
not the thorns and the thistles, then some
other.
And so the sovereign who was meant to
rule easily over the whole of creation now
can only get his bread by the...
Why is this, my friend?
It's because of sin.
That's what the book says.
Sin has brought something sinister into life.
And henceforth, nature will not willingly and openly
and ungrudgingly give of herself to support the
sinner upon whose life lies the condemnation of
God, the curse upon Satan, and the curse
upon the soil.
Now, you and I live in a world
that is under that curse.
Therefore, whether you're a psychologist or a philosophist
or a philosopher or a scientist or anything
else, if this is a truth that is
enunciated in the word of God, you and
I have to look at the world in
which we live in the light of these
truths.
Politicians don't believe it.
Many others don't believe it.
But this is the bedrock upon which the
whole writing of Scripture in the Old Testament
and in the New Testament rests.
Everything is built upon this as a foundation.
But there is a thread that goes right
through life which is a dark thread.
This twofold curse rests upon the serpent, Satan,
and the soil of earth.
Now come with me to the next two,
the condemnation of Eve and the condemnation of
Adam.
And that's the order of Scripture.
It's not my order.
But will you please notice this?
It's very necessary for a real, clear understanding
of things.
God's curse did not come directly upon man
or woman.
It could have, but it did not.
God's curse came indirectly upon Adam and Eve,
and it has come indirectly upon us, in
that it is a curse upon Satan and
a curse upon the soil.
But God's condemnation came upon Eve and upon
Adam, and it has come upon every sinner
since, for we are condemned who have sinned
against God.
One other thing I want you to notice
before I come to this, because we can't
deal with it tonight, but before God speaks
to Eve and to Adam in terms of
condemnation, He first announces a Saviour.
And that is in verse fifteen.
I have already read this.
It's one of the most delightful words in
the Old Testament.
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.
Now that is the first indication of a
Saviour in the Bible.
An enmity is going to grow between Satan
and the seed of the woman.
Not the seed of Adam, but the seed
of the woman.
And it is taken that this is a
faint gleam of the evangel that was to
come, and of the Saviour who was to
be born.
The seed of the woman who will bruise
Satan's head.
Paul, towards the end of his epistle to
the Romans, tells the Romans that the day
is fast coming when someone will bruise Satan's
head.
In other words, the victory of salvation is
coming when the enemy of mankind will be
completely overtaken.
Now let's look at the condemnation here.
What does it mean?
We look first of all upon the temporal
condemnation upon the woman.
And again, there are many things here that
can only be explained in terms of this
book of Genesis.
Look at the first part of verse 16.
Having announced that there is hope coming, now
God speaks the dark things of condemnation.
First to the woman.
To the woman he said, I will greatly
multiply your pain and childbearing.
In pain you shall bring forth children.
Two things I want you to notice there.
First, woman was condemned to the travail of
parenthood.
Secondly, she was condemned to the tensions of
partnership.
The travel of bringing a child in the
world, the tensions of living in the world
with a husband.
Let's look at them very briefly.
She was condemned to the travel of parenthood.
I will bring, I will greatly multiply your
pain and childbearing.
In pain you shall bring forth children.
Oh yes, she shall take her part in
the original mandate to be fruitful, and to
multiply the seed, and to fill and replenish
the earth.
Oh yes, but not without pain.
You cannot break the laws of God and
not suffer pain.
The pleasure of conception will be matched by
the pain of birth.
God says so.
That's what this book says.
The pleasure of man and wife coming together,
all that will be matched by the pain
of producing the child that has been conceived.
And it's to be a reminder of the
sin that brought man and woman from the
throne God meant them to occupy.
Just as the man will find the shadow
of death in the toil and the struggle
for sustenance, notice, so will the woman find
tears and pain in the struggle to produce
a child, to bring the fetus to the
birth.
She will have children and she will rejoice
when she has a child, as the book
tells us and as experience tells us.
She will fulfill her native desires for motherhood.
Yes, yes, there's mercy in judgment.
But life cannot be altogether as if Eden
had never happened, as if disobedience had never
taken place.
A sorrow and a cloud of pain which
is closely related to death will mark her
womanly pilgrimage, mitigated in many, many ways by
the providence of God and by His grace,
mitigated increasingly over the years by the grace
of God.
But it is still there.
And it is there, according to this passage,
because of the sin of man and the
rebellion of mankind against God.
And it is particularly the temporal consequence of
sin upon the woman, that not only was
she condemned to the travel of parenthood, but
to the tensions of partnership.
Your desire shall be for your husband.
That's understandable.
Sex was a gift of God.
Desire is desire.
God gave it, God ordered it, God ordained
it that way.
But this is the strange twist in the
providence.
And He shall rule over you.
And the word for rule means dominant.
The promise of being one flesh is not
withdrawn.
God does not withdraw His promises.
But gone is the prospect of a sweetly
harmonious relationship of two beings bearing the image
of God, loving one another without tensions, without
any disharmony.
Gone is the hope of it until Jesus
Christ saves man from sin.
That's why there are tensions in the world.
That's why families break up.
Because into this intimate aspect of life there
comes something whereby man receives what he desires
and does not always return good for good,
but begins to dominate.
I came across a comment on this which
I think is worth repeating.
The phrase, Your desire shall be for your
husband, with the reciprocating, He shall rule over
you, portrays a marriage relation in which control
has slipped from the fully personal realm to
that of instinctive urges, passive and active.
To love and to cherish becomes to desire
and to dominate.
While even pagan marriages can rise far above
this, the pull of sin is always towards
it.
Partnership between fallen beings cannot other than get
sour at certain points.
It is only the grace of God.
And it is only the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit and the light of the Word
and the things that stem from our salvation
that can bring order and beauty and peace
and harmony into this relationship again.
Don't forget that the first children born to
Adam and Eve after this so quarreled with
one another that a brother murdered a brother,
turned sour indeed.
If Eve, out of a desire for sensual
pleasure, a pleasure, ate the fruit of the
forbidden tree, she is destined to be a
creature of desire all her days.
And he who satisfies that desire will take
advantage of her because he is now a
fallen being.
That brings me to the last thing, the
temporal consequences upon man.
Just as in the case of Eve, two
things are to be said.
We have already referred to the one of
them in passing, so I don't need to
dwell upon it, but here they are.
Man is condemned to toil with the soil
for his living.
Refer to it.
Suffice it to say then that the struggle
for subsistence is nowhere easy.
There are thorns, there are thistles, there are
weeds, there are other such factors to be
found everywhere in the world.
Oh, in some places the soil is very
fruitful.
Never without weeds.
Remember visiting in the south of England, and
if you know the south of England, you
know that the soil is really marvelous there,
and the grass is lovely and green.
And to have a well-ordered garden in
the south of England is invariably a picture.
I remember visiting a home, and the garden
was idyllic.
And I passed a comment, and the gentleman
who lived there said to me, he saw
very well for you to say that, he
said, you know, we were away for two
months, the beginning of the summer.
You won't believe me when I tell you,
he says, that three of us had to
clear away the overgrowth when I came back.
Three of you clear away the overgrowth, the
weeds, and the thistles, and various other things.
It's just like that.
Anywhere in the world, leave the sweetest, the
most beautiful, the most fruitful, the most beautiful
garden you ever saw, leave it to itself,
and what happens?
You know.
Man was condemned to a life of toil,
and though God's grace has allowed a mitigation
of it in certain areas, it will not
be completely taken away until the Lord returns.
He is condemned to toil with the soil
for his living, and man is condemned to
return to the soil at his dying.
Listen to this.
Till you return to the ground, for out
of it were you taken, you are dust,
and to dust you will return.
Now, I don't know that I can possibly
bring out the pathos of the tragedy that
lies in that statement.
Who are we talking about?
Who is this man?
It was made in the image of God.
He was made to be a king of
the universe, the vice-regent for God, to
rule and to subdue everything according to the
will of God.
Something went wrong.
Now God says to him, Man, Adam, he
says, you're nothing but dust.
Dust you are, and to dust you will
return.
Do you remember what we heard a little
earlier on about dust?
Do you remember?
The serpent grovels in the dust and lives
on it.
Man, made in the image of God, is
destined to disintegrate physically into dust and become
the element for the serpent.
There is something awesome about to commit a
little funeral service, if we bear in mind
its significance.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to
dust.
Thus does the king of all the earth,
I mean king with a small k, king
under the great king, thus does the appointed
prince of the universe fall into dust.
Mark that all these features in Adam and
Eve's condemnation are but shadows of death or
intimately related to it.
They have died spiritually, and all these things
are symbols of death itself.
Eve's travel in childbirth and her tensions in
marriage.
All these things are symbolic of death, aspects
of death or its outworking.
Adam's toiling with the soil in his living
and returning to the dust in his dying.
In other words, a shadow of death has
come over the whole of the world and
over the whole of living.
Thunder peals in paradise.
Sin must be a terrible thing, sin must
be a serious thing, if God deals with
it like this.
My good friend, it is.
It is.
And you see, the tragedy with the world
is this, that we take an entirely different
view of things.
This is one reason why I'm walking along
this pilgrimage, why I'm taking it in these
days.
I feel that really we're not seeing things
with the seriousness of men and women who
believe the book.
We've been so indoctrinated by human ideas and
philosophies and cults sometimes, that we're just missing
the wood for the trees.
Sin is serious.
It is so serious as to bring the
curse of God not only upon the serpent,
Satan, but upon the soil of earth.
Paul tells us that nature was made subject
to vanity.
And if you listen carefully, he says, you
will find the undertones of travail awaiting for
the day of the redemption when something different
will take place.
Thanks be to God.
This is not the end of the story.
One day our Lord Jesus Christ is coming
back.
One day this whole universe shall be lapped
in flames that will purge it, says Peter.
We shall look for a new heaven and
a new earth, he says, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
And in that expurged earth, the lion shall
lie down with the lamb.
And once again, the desert shall blossom as
the rose.
And when sin is expunged and the blood
of Christ has clenched the universe, and the
regeneration of all things emerges, the tragedy of
Eden will lead to the glory of God's
new creation.
Will you be in it?
Only if, only if, by the grace of
the same Saviour, you were made a new
creation beforehand.
Not that defileth shall enter into that new
world.
That's from the book of the Revelation.
It's not my word.
Not that defileth shall enter into the city.
Very well then, there is only one thing.
I must be cleansed.
I must be purged.
And I must be changed.
There is only one who can do that.
By His infinite grace, He is here with
us tonight.
By His Spirit.
We have His promises.
Come unto me.
And I will give you rest.
I have forgiveness for your wounded soul from
my wounded body.
I have peace for your troubled heart.
But I breathe out upon you.
Will you receive me?
O my friend, if Jesus Christ is not
yours tonight, come to Him.
Open your heart.
Open your life.
Open your soul.
Open your being to Him.
Let Him come in and make another Eden
of the garden of your heart.
Now, I've done a thing tonight which is
very daring.
In hope of what we're going to think
of next time, rather than in misery, on
the basis of some of the things we've
heard tonight, I have chosen a hymn in
which you will hear these words.
No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor
thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make His blessings flow far
as the curse is found.