It’s not about sex...

Genesis 3: 1 – 24

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning 02 Mar, 2008

“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?

How do you like hearing that kind of statement? Doesn’t it feel like an accusation? And who wants to be accused?

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 would soon leave the choir she sang with and spend 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?”

Uh-oh! It suddenly struck me. The “ng”s in singing had turned into “n”s. To her it sounded like the Baptist pastor was making accusations about her morals, not asking about her music!

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 what’s the point in telling people what they already know about themselves?

Most people have problems with the idea of sin. 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 of us don’t really understand what “sin” means. Even Christians get confused. Sin is not just about gross wickedness. Sin is 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. First, 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, so I took two aspirins 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 any Greek from a doctor these days for $5!

Anyone can be like that doctor. They can tell you the symptoms, but what help is that? How would you feel if you had a rash and the doctor 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 say.”

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, a sickness which prompts sinful deeds.

Get that distinction quite clear, or you will misunderstand what the gospel is about.

Some people fall into a particular sin over and over. Drunkenness, sexual addiction, stealing, whatever. We’ve all met them. You could 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?”

Some psychologists are more Biblical than some Christians are. The psychologist looks at symptoms and seeks the root cause; some Christians think the symptoms are the diagnosis.

Go back to the basics. Go back to the Bible itself, and see what it is saying.

The Bible will keep you spot on about the reality of human behaviour, because the Bible itself is clear about what makes us tick. Christians who are ignorant of the Bible are generally also 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 the man and the woman are in a beautiful garden. In the garden are two trees:the tree of knowledge, and the tree of life.

There isn’t an apple in sight. 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 isn’t about sex. The Fall is not the result of Adam and Eve discovering sex. The Bible doesn’t say that.

Of course, 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. This is more Greek philosophy than a truly Biblical attitude. Even by pretty liberal interpretations, Genesis goes back to 300 or so years before Greek philosophers began thinking about how evil our humanity is, how corrupt the created world is. But that’s not what the Bible teaches.

Back in Genesis 1, we saw 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 ever suggest that the creation is evil.

The link between human sin and sex is like the link between elephants and \red-painted concrete paths.

Did you know that, if you have a red–painted concrete path, it will keep elephants out of your yard? I can vouch for that fact. We have a red painted concrete front path, and we’ve never had elephants in the yard.

When some 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 didn’t cause the fall, just because the two go together. Sex is mentioned in Genesis for two reasons.

First, because, before 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 scary or inappropriate for a couple to be naked around each other.

Second, because, after the Fall, Eve had children, and that’s just a continuation of the story of human kind. First there were Adam and Eve, then they had sex and they had children. That would have happened whether or not there was a Fall.

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 commandment.

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.

You’ve seen it. There are times when people do something foolish and wrong and there is virtually no explanation. Why on earth do they feel compelled to take that course?

Then again, some take a course of action because others encouraged them to do it.

A few years back, I read about a woman who snatched a baby and planned to raise it as her own. What a crazy, inexplicable action! Imagine the risk to the child’s life! Imagine the damage to the child’s personality, to the child’s parents’ emotional well–being and to the baby–snatcher herself. Maybe the babynapper was driven by a strong inner need, but that doesn’t explain the pure illogic of the attempt. You could say, “The devil made her do it.”

Yet I have also heard of someone being encouraged by a companion to carry out the fantasy of snatching a baby. Have you ever been encouraged in your rebellion by someone else?

But never forget the further factor of your own will. We all have a will to rebel.

In a work situation once, I was badly treated by a fellow worker, who rallied allies to himself against me.

I hated what was happening. Yet, in fact, I had let it happen. I accepted the abuse, 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, preferrably with no arguments with Eve. He had probably already seen the e-mail that reveals that a woman who says, “All right...” is never agreeing with you, but just gaining time to work out suitable punishment.

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...

You understand what he is saying. You know that each of us has a bent to sinning within us. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see the tendency or bias we all have in the direction of selfishness, self–indulgence, and neglect of others. And it can only be overcome when our lives are filled with God — 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 how God excludes the man and the woman from the place of blessing. If he didn’t, they would just go on with their foolishness forever, in the place where they would do the most damage.

^{GEN 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 builds a wall 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. It’s not a party wall where you can hear the people on the other side breathing. It’s a wall like Hadrian’s wall to keep the Scottish Picts out of England, like the Great Wall of China, like the wall between Israel and Palestine.

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. We are trapped behind the wall we built for ourselves.

Yet you know the truth. God created us for fellowship with himself, and he has never given up this purpose nor let it fade. He created us to love us. He created us because he loves us. He sent his son because he loves us.

Yet there is a rebelliousness within you and me, a rebelliousness we learn from each other, a rebelliousness passed down through our families, tainting each one of us. And that rebellion is called, “sin”. The great problem of humanity is our rejection of God’s rule.

It is sin which separates us from God; it is sin which gives us the sense that God 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.

I know that Jesus died for me when I had nothing in myself to give me a right to his love. It was an act of pure grace.

And I know that my rebelliousness is forgiven through the blood he shed for me.

And that makes all the difference.

I urge you today: acknowledge your sin; turn back to God; and discover the difference that Jesus makes through faith in his name.

Don’t hang back when he calls you: he will not always plead with us.

Holy Spirit, touch each one of us today, and give grace to repent and believe to all who have not yet come to Jesus; in his name we ask it,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)