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The basic problem

Genesis 3: 1 – 24.

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 29 Aug, 2004

“YOU ARE all sinners!” How do you feel when I say that? I’m not asking what you think, because we probably all acknowledge the fact. How does it feel?.

  Most people dislike hearing that kind of statement. It feels like an accusation. And no one wants to be accused.

  You know what it is like, talking when you have a cold. I made the mistake of talking to a soprano once when I had a slight cold. She was pregnant at the time, and I had heard that she might leave the choir she sang with and spend more time at home resting.
  “Hello, Alison!” I said. “How are you keeping? Are you still singing?”
  She became very frosty. “What did you just ask me?”
  Then it became clear. The “ng”s in singing had turned into “n”s. To her it sounded as though the Baptist pastor was making accusations about her morals, not asking about her musical plans!

  I’m still not sure that she believed my explanation!

  I don’t ask anyone, “Are you still sinning?” I already know the answer! And I usually don’t see much point in telling people what they already know about themselves.
Here’s the problem most people have with the idea of sin.
  First, no one wants to admit to failure. We all want gold; who wants to be the one who collapsed before the finishing line?
  And most people don’t really understand what we mean when we talk about “sin”. Even Christians often misunderstand it. Sin is not just about the grossest wickednesses. Sin is about the ordinary condition of people like you and me.
  Third, sin is more an attitude than a behaviour. It is a disease with symptoms, a sickness at the heart of our humanity.

  Once I slammed my finger in a car door. I think I went a bit pale. Then I had to mop up the blood coming from under my fingernail. I had a blood blister for the Guinness Book.
  It was night time, so I took some aspirin and went to bed. The next day, I headed to the doctor, hoping he could save the nail.
  He took a look. “You have a perionychia,” he said. “That’s Greek. It means that you’ve bled under the nail. I can’t do anything about it now. I could have if you’d come last night. So you have learnt some Greek today, and it has cost you $5.” Of course, you don’t get much Greek from a doctor these days for $5!

  A lot of people are like that doctor. They can tell you the symptoms, but that doesn’t help you, does it? How would you feel if you had a rash and you went to the doctor and he said, “You have a rash. There is a Greek word for a rash, but all it means is a rash. That’s all I can tell you.”
  You don’t want that! You want a diagnosis! Is it heat rash from wearing a pullover in the sun? Is it a fungal infection, like tinea? Is it Chicken Pox or Dermatitis? You want to know what the disease is, not just the symptom.

  And that’s the story with sin. Sin is the sickness within, which prompts sinful deeds.
  Unless we get that distinction quite clear, we will misunderstand the rest of what the gospel is about.
  We’ve all come across the person who falls into a particular sin over and over. It might be drunkenness or sexual addiction, or stealing. We’ve all met such people. Sometimes we like to call that repetitive behaviour “sin”.
  A psychologist would want to know the answer to questions like, “What is happening to you when the temptation becomes overwhelming?” “Is there a pattern to your behaviour? Do you always steal teatowels, do you go for girls with long hair, do you drink only Fosters?”
  The psychologist’s approach can be more Biblical than some Christians are. The psychologist looks at symptoms and seeks the root cause; some Christians view the symptoms and think they’ve made a diagnosis.
  That’s why we always need to go back to the basics, go back to the Bible itself, and see what it is saying.
  Thoughtful readers of the Bible are often spot on about the reality of human behaviour, because the Bible itself is clear about what makes us tick. It’s Christians who are ignorant of the  Bible who are also generally ignorant of human behaviour.

  Our Bible passage again looks at the human story, and tells us what makes us tick.
  You have to go beyond the surface and seek the underlying reality of this account.
  In Genesis 3 we find the man and the woman in a beautiful garden. In the garden are two trees; one is the tree of knowledge and one is the tree of life.

  Notice that there isn’t an apple in sight. Do you know why they talk about apples? When apples reached Western Europe in the Middle Ages, people thought they were the best thing since sliced bread, and that hadn’t even been invented yet.
  So they thought to themselves, “The most tempting fruit around would have to be an apple. That must have been what Eve found on the tree!”

  Also, the story has nothing to do with sex. The Fall of humankind is not the result of their discovering sex. The Bible doesn’t say that.
  It does say that before the Fall, the man and the woman were naked and it didn’t bother them.
  Nakedness wasn’t a problem when Adam was a teenager. Sex was working as it should work. It wasn’t laden with guilt and fear.
  Genesis does say that, after the Fall, Adam and Eve had sex and had children.

  You can imagine that some people went overboard about connecting sex and sin. In fact, this is more a Greek way of looking at life than a truly Biblical way. You’ve got to remember that even by pretty liberal standards, Genesis goes back to 300 or so years before Greek philosophers were thinking about how evil our humanity is, how corrupt the created world is.

  But that’s not the Bible’s emphasis.
  You know that, back in Genesis 1, we see God looking at everything he created and saying that it is good. All the way through, even to human beings and all that we are capable of, he made it — and it was good.
  The Bible doesn’t support the idea that the creation is evil.

  The link between human sin and sex is like how you can keep elephants out of your yard by having a red-painted concrete path.
  I can vouch for that fact. We have a red painted concrete front path, and we’ve never had elephants in the yard.
  Its the same kind of logic when people see sex in the Fall. They assume that things that appear together must have a cause–and–effect relationship.
  Red paths do not actually cause elephants to keep away.
  The facts are that I have a red path and I don’t have elephants, but the cause and effect thing is that I don’t have elephants because none of us has elephants.
  Sex is mentioned in Genesis for two reasons.
  First, because, prior to the Fall, it hadn’t been corrupted. There was no paedophilia, there was no rape, there was no sexual manipulation, there was nothing to make it at all scary or inappropriate for a couple to be naked around each other.
  Second, because, after the Fall, Eve had children, and that’s where cause and effect comes into play. There was nothing strange or unusual in what occurred. Adam and Eve had sex and had children. It’s like I sometimes say, Chris and I had four children, but then we found out what was causing it.
  And that’s all that Genesis is really saying about sex. It was created good, it hadn’t been used corruptly in any way before the Fall, and it continued to do what it was made to do after the Fall, even though the Fall had affected every part of our humanity, including sex.

  Here’s the real picture that Genesis presents: the human beings deliberately chose to rebel against God and his command to them.

  That’s what the story really tells us.

  As soon as they rebelled, of course they knew by experience what Good and Evil were.

  There are many triggers for rebellion against God and his decrees. This story shows, for example, that some people rebel because of spiritual input, satanic input.
  If you think about it, there are times when people will do something foolish and wrong and there is virtually no explanation. Why on earth do they feel compelled to take that course?
  Then again, other people take a course of action because they are encouraged to do it by other people.

  From time to time you hear about someone who snatches a baby planning to raise it as her own. It’s a crazy, inexplicable action. It always places the child’s life at risk. It is always highly destructive to the child’s personality, to the child’s parents’ emotional well–being and to the baby–snatcher herself. Generally, the babynapper has a strong inner need which drives her. But that doesn’t explain the pure illogic of the attempt. You could say, “The devil made her do it.”
  Yet there have also been instances, where a person has been encouraged by a companion to carry out the fantasy of snatching a baby. Sometimes we are encouraged in our rebellion by someone else.

  But there is always a further factor, which is our will. Somewhere there is a will to rebel.

  In a work situation some time back, I was badly treated by a fellow worker, who rallied allies to himself and against me.
  I hated what was happening. Yet I realised later that I had let it happen, that I had accepted it, because this person was almost saying, “I will do some of your job for you if you will let me abuse you.”
  That may sound strange to you, but it is a very common story! — and I’m not just talking about the patterns in my own life.

  Eve ate the fruit because she wanted to have that secret knowledge. She felt that God was holding out on her. The serpent played on her sense of being hard done by.
  Adam ate the fruit because Eve asked him to, and anyway it looked good and she said it tasted good.
  She was looking for change, he was looking for a good time and no arguments with the woman. He had probably already seen that e-mail that reveals that a woman who says, “All right...” is never agreeing with you, but just gaining time to work out suitable retribution. He knew better than to give Eve any reason to say, All right...”

  But what it really tells us is that, no matter what motivates us, in the end we are still rebelling against God. And that rebellion leads to all kinds of horrors.
  God said,

In the day that you eat of that fruit you shall surely die.

  They didn’t drop dead on the spot. If they had, you and I wouldn’t be here to know it.
  But part of them died. The ability to relate to God died. Their spiritual life died.
  They became strangers, alienated from God. Once they walked in the cool of the evening with their Creator, but now they hid themselves. Once they talked with God as friends, but now they were afraid of him.

  And the Bible is consistent all through, that there is a rebelliousness in the human heart, a passion to go contrary to God’s will and purposes.

  Paul puts it this way:

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

  One modern sociologist — I can‘t remember who — says that people are driven by radical self–interest. If you want a definition of sin, that’s it: we have a self–interest driving us, a self–interest so deeply ingrained in us that it can truly be described as “radical”. It is at the root of what motivates us in every area of life: “Look after Number One.”

  One of Charles Wesley’s hymns says,

Take away the bent to sinning,
Alpha and Omega be...

  He recognises that the essential problem is that each of us has a bent to sinning within us, a tendency or a bias in that direction, which is only overcome when our lives are filled instead with God from beginning to end.
  God can‘t tolerate that rebellion, because all kinds of destructive and self–destructive deeds come out of it.

  In Genesis 3: 21 – 24, we read of God excluding the man and the woman from the place of blessing, lest they perpetuate their foolishness forever.

GE 3:21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life

  Sin creates a barrier between us on the one side and a holy God on the other side, a God so pure that he can’t look on sin.
  If it weren’t for the sacrificial death of Jesus, there would be no way out of this situation. Sin has backed every one of us into a blind canyon, and death encircles us on all sides.

  What we have seen is that God created us for fellowship with himself, and this purpose has never diminished or faded.
  But there is a rebelliousness inside each one of us, a rebelliousness which we learn from each other, a rebelliousness passed down through our families, tainting each one of us. It is a rebellion which no one can avoid. And that rebellion is called, “sin”.

  It is sin which separates us from God and gives us the sense that he is far away and hard to find.

  You know, in one sense, I don’t really mind knowing that I am a sinner. It gives me an explanation for myself. I know what disease I have, and so I understand the symptoms.

  But what makes all the difference for me is that I know that my sinful deeds — past, present and future — are paid for through the cross. And I know that my rebelliousness is forgiven through the blood shed for me.
  And that makes all the difference.

  May we all acknowledge our sin and discover the difference that Jesus makes.
AMEN