Would you take the number 72, okay, got
72, and alright, now multiply it by 4,
okay, and divide that by 8, okay.
So 72, multiply by 4, and divide by
8, okay.
Alright, now will you multiply that by 2?
No.
Did you get 72?
No, okay.
Now why, why?
When you know how to divide, you know
how to multiply.
And you know that part of it is,
well, I mean it's sort of corny, I'm
asking you on Sunday morning to start doing
mathematics, and you can't get the mind together
fast enough to start doing it, but part
of it is the old concentration, you know,
I'm trying, yeah, well, multiply by 8, yeah,
divide by 4, yeah.
And concentration so often prevents us really using
the abilities that we have.
What did you do last Tuesday?
Or what did you do the Wednesday before?
And yet you know that the capacity is
there alright.
If you stimulated the cortex of your brain
with certain electrical charges, you could bring back
things that you did when you were a
child.
So, you know, the capacities really are there.
You can do it, but somehow, because of
a lack of something inside us, they don't
work quite right, do they?
You know, most of the Reader's Digest articles
over the past 20 or 30 years are
based on this fact that we use about
a tenth of our potential.
That really, we have all kinds of mental
capacities that are capable of great feats of
mathematical and logical calculation, but somehow we're not
using them all.
And you remember that last Sunday we shared
that our minds aren't working the way they
were meant to because of the lack of
the planned energy that God had provided for
them.
And that's why our minds don't work the
way they used to.
And yet that deterioration was gradual.
Really, it was.
I'll prove that to you if you look
at Genesis 11 and 4 through 6.
All our mental capacities began to deteriorate only
gradually as they lacked the energy that God
had made available to them.
And Genesis 11 and verse 4, Then they
said, Come, let us build ourselves a city
and a tower with its top in the
heavens, and let us make a name for
ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the
face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the
city and the tower which the sons of
men had built.
And the Lord said, Behold, they are one
people, and they have all one language, and
this is only the beginning of what they
will do.
And nothing that they proposed to do will
now be impossible for them.
Only to look at the Egyptian pyramids, you
see, to realize that men's minds deteriorated only
gradually as more and more men produced more
and more children who lacked the perfect mind
that their great forefather Adam had when the
Holy Spirit was available to them.
And it's only gradually that the minds deteriorated.
As they were without the power of the
Holy Spirit, so the mind of the race
gradually declined.
You can see it, you know, if you
examine the Inca civilizations.
They obviously were capable of incredible things that
we are only catching up with.
We all have a feeling that the Chinese
civilization and culture and education was even beyond
ours, let alone beyond what they are today.
And so it was only gradually, you see,
that the effects of the lack of the
Holy Spirit on the minds of men and
women began to be felt.
But it was felt once, until we come
to this point today, where we, because we've
been so long without the power of the
Holy Spirit running through fathers and mothers who
had sons and daughters, our minds are really
all just a fraction and a shadow of
what they used to be when God's Spirit
of life was available to them.
It's the same with our bodies, you know.
The old body is weak again and again,
isn't it?
Again and again it's sluggish when we want
it to work.
Repeatedly we find that it's weary when we
want it to do something.
And yet we know fine well that there
are times when our bodies are capable of
incredible feats of endurance that we're just amazed
at.
I think all of us are amazed at
the pain that a woman can bear in
childbirth.
We're amazed at the unbearable pain that even
our own bodies can face when they're really
put to the test.
We only have to look at some of
the tortures that men have gone through in
prison to see that the body is capable
of much more than really we use it
for.
And yet it is true, isn't it, that
our bodies have shared in this gradual deterioration
that we've all experienced through man-required refusing
the gift of the Holy Spirit that God
offered to him in the tree of life
at the beginning of the world.
And yet even that deterioration was gradual too.
You can see that if you check up
the normal top age for Americans with the
top age mentioned here in Genesis 6 and
verse 3.
Genesis 6 and verse 3.
Obviously, in other words, men didn't begin immediately
to die at 70 years of age or
80.
Genesis 6 and verse 3.
Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not
abide in man forever, for he is flesh,
but his days shall be a hundred and
twenty years.
And there were plain instances in those ancient
times where men lived way beyond that.
So that obviously it was a gradual deterioration.
We didn't all end up in this present
state of physical weakness and intellectual dwarf behavior.
We didn't all end up in this position
immediately.
It was only gradually as more and more
parents had more and more children who were
used to living with fathers and mothers whose
minds were not working correctly and efficiently.
So that began to be passed on down
through the years.
And you remember it all really started with
what is called the fall.
That's why so many of us differ from
the evolutionists who say, Oh, you're getting so
much better every day.
We can do so many things that we
couldn't do before, but they don't realize that
there was a golden age.
That even the old classical authors, you know,
Virgil and Caesar and Cicero, point to a
golden age when things were once really far
more beautiful and far more perfect than they
are today.
And we see really in Jesus' account and
the account of the people in the Old
Testament that that was so.
There was a time when it was beautiful.
And really what we're experiencing is devolution, not
evolution.
What we're experiencing is a great decline, not
a great growing or a great ascending.
But you know, we realize that all that
started at the time called the fall.
There was a fall of mankind.
There was a time when we were much
higher than we are today, mentally and emotionally
and physically and spiritually.
And there was a time when we fell
from all that.
And that's the word that's used, dear ones.
If you look at Romans 5 and 15,
which is really the verse that we'd study
today, Romans 5 and 15, that's the word
that's used there.
It's page 981 in that black RSV Bible,
981.
And Romans 5 and 15, that's the word
that's used, you see, at the end of
that first sentence in verse 15.
But the free gift is not like the
trespass.
Now, the word in Greek is paraptoma, and
actually the right translation of it is the
fall.
It's the first trespass and therefore the original
fall.
And what Paul is saying is the free
gift is not like the first fall.
And the first fall was just that, you
know.
Literally, paraptoma means a slip or a fall
sideways.
It's a false step, and it refers to
the first slip sideways that man made.
And that's really what it was like, you
know.
It was just a slight deviation from what
was God's perfect will for him.
That's probably why you and I experience death
so often without knowing how we came into
it.
Because actually, it only requires a slight deviation
from what is God's perfect will for us
to begin to experience this death.
Now remember, it did seem just a little
fall.
It just seemed a little slip.
If you look at it in Genesis 3
and 5, it must have seemed to Adam
and Eve that all they were trying to
do was achieve God's purpose in a slightly
different way.
And that was what the fall was all
about, Genesis 3 and 5.
You remember, Satan said, God knows that when
you eat of it your eyes will be
opened and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil.
And it was really just a little slip
sideways.
It was just Adam and Eve saying, yeah,
well, God made us to be like himself.
And this, finding out what is good and
what is evil on our own, this will
make us like God.
So it seems we'll achieve the purpose that
God made for us originally, but we'll just
be doing it by a slightly different method.
And brothers and sisters, that's what it is
with us, you know.
Why you experience further death in your mind
or your emotions or your body is normally
not because you've committed some terrible, devastating sin,
but usually because you've just rejected a little
God's Spirit for you at that moment.
Usually that's where it all comes from, you
see.
And really the big issue in Christianity is
not good and evil.
Do you see that?
I mean, they were fulfilling good and evil.
Old Adam was saying, well, we know the
difference between good and evil.
That's all that's needed.
That wasn't what God was concerned about.
The issue was not good and evil.
The issue is, would you receive my Spirit's
will for you at this moment in your
life, whether other people call it good or
call it evil.
The issue is not good and evil, you
see.
In fact, they could have avoided good, but
done it independent of God's Spirit.
And they'd still have been falling out of
God's fellowship.
So the issue is not good and evil.
That's why so many ethical systems, you know,
and so many ancient Eastern religions are really
beside the point, because they're all concerned with
being good and avoiding evil.
But that isn't the deal with God.
The deal with God is, are you resisting
my Holy Spirit inside you, or are you
not?
That's what concerns me.
In other words, you could know the difference
between good and evil perfectly.
You could always avoid evil and always hit
good, but you could be doing it independent
of God's Holy Spirit.
And so that is what the fall is
all about.
And when you reject His Holy Spirit, then
the whole personality begins to suffer the decline
that we've talked about here.
And really, that's what the fall is all
about, you know.
It isn't a tremendous rebellion.
It's just a slight deviation from what was
God's perfect will for them.
He said, look, here's a tree of life.
You can receive my Holy Spirit from it,
and if you do that, my Holy Spirit
will make you like myself.
He'll make your mind work perfectly, your emotions
work perfectly, your body work perfectly.
He'll fill the world with my love and
my life.
That's all you have to do.
And old Adam and Eve just turned aside
a little and said, no, no, we'd rather
know what is good and evil by ourselves.
We'd rather decide it for ourselves.
We want to do it without your Spirit.
Well, of course, it was His Spirit that
made everything work, you know.
It was like gas to the automobile engine.
It was electricity, like electricity to an electric
razor.
It was the thing that made the whole
thing work.
And once you were without that, the whole
thing fell into decline.
Well, that's what the fall is about, you
see.
And really, Jones, I know we're facing it
and fighting it in every class almost, at
least in the natural sciences, aren't we?
We're fighting it.
We're fighting this idea that we're evolving into
something beautiful and that if you give us
long enough, you know, Nietzsche and the rest
of us will become the master race.
Loved ones, it isn't so.
We've been on the way down since this
fall out of God's fellowship.
And really, you remember the death that resulted.
The death was, well, it's outlined plainly really
in Genesis, in Genesis 3 and 8.
The first kind of death that took place
there, and we've mentioned it before, Genesis 3
and 8, was really a death as far
as God was concerned.
Immediately, men rejected God's spirit.
They began to feel uncomfortable in his presence.
Really uncomfortable, you know.
And you get that in Genesis 3 and
8.
And they heard the sound of the Lord
God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day.
And up to then, you know, they'd always
just gone forward to meet him and say
how good the world was and how glad
they were he'd put them in it.
But when the man and his wife hid
themselves from the presence of the Lord God
among the trees of the garden.
And loved ones, every time you reject that
little movement of God's spirit inside you, there
comes some furtiveness and stealth into your life,
you know.
There comes a sort of discomfort inside.
And that's what happened with the old Adam
and Eve in 9 and 10, you see.
But the Lord God called to the man
and said to him, where are you?
And he said, I heard the sound of
thee in the garden, and I was afraid
because I was naked, and I hid myself.
And really, that's the first kind of result
that came about in Adam and in the
rest of us.
We no longer felt at home in the
universe.
We no longer felt this was a friendly
place.
We no longer felt that there was someone
approving of what we were doing.
We began to feel fearful and insecure.
When thunder and lightning took place, which you
remember was just part of the death that
the universe itself experienced.
When that took place, we began to be
fearful and unhappy and concerned.
And we began to lack the security that
would automatically have come to us if we'd
really done what our Father asked us to
do.
And so really, there began to be a
race of men and women who were neurotics,
who were filled with fear of their own
shadow, who were filled with terror of the
darkness, who were filled with insecurity and uncertainty,
who were filled with a need for somebody
to approve them, because the great God of
the universe did not approve them.
That was part of the death that came.
And then you can see really what happened
in Genesis 3 and 12.
There's only one thing to do, you know,
when you lack approval, or you lack justification,
or you lack security.
You have to try to prove that everybody
else is worse than you.
And that's what old Adam did, Genesis 3
and 12.
The man said, the woman whom thou gavest
to be with me, she gave me fruit
of the tree and I ate.
And so man stepped on that long slide
into self-justification.
And the only thing he could do, you
know, when he knew that he was condemned
by the maker of the universe was, okay,
I have to prove that everybody else is
worse than me.
And from that moment on, men and women
began to consume each other.
You know, we do it ourselves.
Okay, they don't approve of me, but at
least I'm not as bad as so-and
-so.
Then it becomes your responsibility to prove that
so-and-so is worse than you.
And before you know it, you're involved in
counting up each other's faults.
And so that great self-justification method began
in the world.
And men and women began to tear each
other down in order to build themselves up.
And really, brothers and sisters, the world began
to be filled with just a great hatred,
and a great rivalry, and a great competition.
The same kind of thing that we get
a little, you know, with the A's, B's,
and C's, and D's.
Just that kind of sense that it's us
against the universe.
And that wasn't God's plan at all.
And that was part of the death, you
see, that resulted.
And part of the chaos.
And the Father then looked down and saw
us all, us poor paranoids, involved in tearing
each other down and destroying each other in
order to prove to ourselves that we weren't
as bad as the rest.
And he knew that letting us loose in
the world would be like letting Lee Harvey
Oswald loose in a crowded city, you know.
He knew that to let a group of
potential neurotics like ourselves loose in his universe
would mean we would spread our smear and
our dirt and our murder throughout the universe.
And do you see that's why God had
to prevent us from living forever?
That's really why he had to do it.
His first job was to limit the amount
of harm and pain and agony that we
could cause in his universe.
And that's why, you see, you get that
action of his there in Genesis 3 and
22.
You remember Genesis 3, 22.
Then the Lord God said, Behold, a man
has become like one of us, knowing good
and evil.
And now lest he put forth his hand
and take also up a tree of life
and eat and live forever.
And so God had to limit the chaos
that we could create.
And that's why he took away, first of
all, our eternal life.
He had to bring us to a place
where our physical life was limited.
Then you remember he had to withdraw his
Holy Spirit.
Because the Holy Spirit, you see, produces many
incidental qualities of divinity that we do not
normally think about.
The Holy Spirit can obviously enable you to
travel through space.
Now, obviously, the Holy Spirit enables us to
do certain things at certain times.
That is not appropriate at this present time,
so he doesn't do that at the present
time.
When we go to be with God, obviously,
we'll be able to travel through the space
and through the universe at tremendous speed because
of the Holy Spirit.
Now, do you see that with that kind
of power available in the Holy Spirit, we
could have wrought havoc until God secondly withdrew
the Holy Spirit from us.
And you read that, you remember, in Genesis
3 and 24.
He drove out the man and at the
east of the garden of Eden he placed
the chariot and a flaming sword which turned
every way to guard the way to the
tree of life.
And then, you remember, God subjected the whole
world to frustration and futility so that we
would know that the Holy Spirit was lacking
in it.
Verse 18, thorns and thistles it shall bring
forth to you and you shall eat the
plants of the field.
And that was the kind of death, brothers
and sisters, that spread throughout the world.
And that's the kind of world that you
and I have entered into.
A world that is filled with people who
are neurotic and paranoid.
A world that is filled with people who
are trying to prove that they're better than
everybody else.
A world that is filled with people who
lack the Holy Spirit and therefore who have
minds that are impaired and emotions that are
unbalanced and bodies that are physically weak.
A world that has become a world that
lives for itself, you know, that is antagonistic
to its Creator and that is determined to
live for self alone.
Now, that's the kind of world we have
entered into, you see.
And that far, I think, we have got
on previous Sundays.
And you see, the Creator of the universe
looked down and saw the Rhine turned black
ink with the munition factories of the Ruhr.
And looked down and saw California, one of
his most beautiful creations, blotting out the sun
with the greed of businessmen who wanted to
succeed whatever it cost anybody else.
And he looked down at the rivers of
Europe, blocked with garbage and sewage by people
who didn't care who lived downstream from them,
who didn't care about anybody but themselves.
And he looked down into our universities, presumably,
and he saw people who were supposed to
be seeking truth.
And he saw them scrambling over one another
to try to make themselves superior.
And using truth to do that.
And do you see that the Father's heart
must have turned just over inside him?
And really, what would you do when you
look down like that?
And do you see that his own word
actually stood against him?
His own word stood against him.
Because he had warned man.
You remember in Genesis chapter 2 and verse
15, verse 17, he had warned man what
would happen if he decided what was good
and evil for himself instead of receiving his
life.
But of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil you shall not eat, for
in the day that you eat of it
you shall die.
And really when the Creator looked down on
us, he saw not only the mess and
the destruction that we had wrought, but he
saw his own word standing against us.
And he saw that if he did not
act at that moment against us, he would
forever be called into question as far as
his justice and his holiness is concerned.
If he did not act at that moment
there and then, then all of us would
laugh.
We would laugh into his face and say,
you are no God of justice, you'll let
us do whatever we want to do.
And he as the final moral arbiter and
authority in the universe was committed to action
of some kind.
Now brothers and sisters, I do not understand
it.
But at that moment God turned.
And it is impossible to describe such a
turning.
But at that moment God turned from the
mess we men and women had made and
from us ourselves.
He turned.
And I don't think eternity will ever be
long enough for us to describe to each
other what that turning involved.
But at that moment he turned for some
reason or other that we cannot understand.
And he looked to his son and said,
will you permit me to destroy their sins
and requite their rebellion in you instead of
them?
And at that moment Jesus embraced the cross.
And that is sheer grace.
There's really no reason for it at all.
And that's why we're alive today, you know.
And it's impossible to explain it.
It's just impossible.
That's why Paul says the free gift is
not at all like the first trespass.
The free gift is not like the first
fall at all.
Where the first fall spread death, the free
gift in the life of that one man,
Jesus Christ, has abounded for many of us.
And brothers and sisters, that's why we're alive
today, you know.
That's why you can even sit in the
theater and have the opportunity to say yes
or no to this God.
Because of sheer grace.
No reason at all but that he just
loved us with all his heart, you know.
And I remember, you know, one man tried
to say it.
I cannot tell how silently he suffered.
I cannot tell how silently he suffered when
with his peace he graced this place of
tears.
Or how his heart upon the cross was
broken, the crown of pain to three and
thirty years.
But this I know, he heals the brokenhearted.
He calms our fears.
He stays our lurking sin.
And this Jesus, this same Jesus, this savior
of this world, is here this morning and
has the same attitude to you.
And if you ask me why, I do
not know.
Just sheer unmerited grace and favor.
That instead of destroying us as we deserved,
he destroyed his son in our place.
And he's able and willing to accept us
as his children and loved ones.
It's just miraculous, you know.
Just need to thank him for it.
Let's pray.