So we’re going to go into Genesis chapter three. This is really a poignant passage of scripture. It’s one that you get in your mind and it never leaves you and it probably guides all of us in thinking about our lives uh all throughout the years God gives us. And I was thinking, you know, if you’ve ever seen any of the movies by writer director Wes Anderson, you know that the movie themes he deals with are pretty adult. Things like loneliness and divorce and broken families and failure and regret and even death. But those serious themes are frequently set against backgrounds of their color saturated almost dollhouse type sets and all the characters seem to be childlike. They’re they’re like children living in the brokenness of an adult world. And there was an essay that was reflecting on Wes Anderson’s movies and uh Michael Chabon writes, “The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it’s also irretrievably broken.” He says, “There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality and entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief. The researcher learns their histories and their bitter lessons by heart.” He concludes by saying, “Along the way he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises from time to time in the researcher’s heart. An intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. That feeling haunts people all their lives.” So he’s just saying that as we all we all discover as we go through life that this is a pretty broken world we’re part of at the same time we’re haunted by what he terms cosmic nostalgia. A glimmer or a hint that this is not how it always was. There’s a hint of vanished glory and lost wholeness and a bit of a memory of a time when the world was not as broken as it is now. I don’t think anyone put it better than Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician. He proposed the reason for human unhappiness. Animals like horses or chickens or frogs, they never appear to be particularly unhappy. They generally seem pretty well adjusted and mature regarding their place in the world. That phrase happy as a clam, it probably comes from somewhere. You know, this degree of contentment among creatures. Not so with humans. We have these moments or flashes, sometimes long seasons of unhappiness, discontent, anxiety. We live in a world of other humans. There’s a sea of brokenness around us. So, Blaise Pascal said that our human unhappiness proves something about our origins and our identities. He said all these miseries prove man’s greatness. They’re the miseries of a great lord. The miseries of a dispossessed king. And I like this next line. He says, “Who thinks himself unhappy at not being a king except a king who has been dispossessed?” So, in our passage this morning, we have the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, representative of all humanity, all of us. They were created as the original king and queen of this world. They were given a delegated by God to subdue and rule over and multiply and fill the earth. But as the credits roll at the end of Genesis chapter 3, this king and queen are being banished from their palatial garden. They’re marched out the gates of Eden, a flaming sword bars their entrance back in. And they’re walking out into a rough world of thorns and thistles with the knowledge that one day they’ll return to the earth, their bodies will disintegrate into dust. Paradise has been lost. Yet the king and queen and all their descendants, right down to us, we retain that cosmic nostalgia for an unbroken world. Who thinks himself unhappy at not being a king except a king who has been dispossessed? Our unhappiness, our discontent are the strongest clues to our true greatness. So last week we looked at the first human sin, cosmic headwaters of disobedience from which all of our disobedience streams, and we left the man and the woman cowering in the bushes, naked and and ashamed. God walking toward them with a booming question that hung in the stillness of the garden. God called out to man saying, “Where are you?” That was the first question he asked, and we’ll continue this morning with two more questions that God asked. Questions not asked because God didn’t know and he needed information. They’re leading questions designed to move the man and woman toward the realization of what they’ve done and eventually toward restoration. So even while the gun barrel of their first sin was still smoking, God had reconciliation with humanity in mind. So our passage this morning reads it’s it’s interesting, goes from the questions of a prosecutor to the verdict of a judge, followed by the mercy of one who gives a stay of execution, and finally there’s a reduced sentence. Allows the king and queen to go out, continue to try to rule as best they can in a stubborn, recalcitrant world. And they go out there, they’re going out wearing sin and trouble and heartache and death like an ankle monitor and one they’ll never be able to get off. They’ll have to wear that monitor for the rest of their lives and their lives will be much shortened as a result. So, prosecution, verdict, a stay of execution, and a reduced but still a pretty difficult sentence. Let’s look at these things. First, the remaining two questions of the prosecutor. Following the sin of the man and the woman, we have God coming to the site where the bomb went off and he begins sifting through the wreckage. He first asks, “Where are you?” And Adam sheepishly emerges from out under the debris, out of the bushes, hastily clad, barely clad in fig leaves. He stammers out the answer, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” Now, the garden had always been the place where God and man would commune and they would talk and they would enjoy one another, but Adam’s relationship after sin had instantly become estranged and corrupted to the point that he’s trying to hide from God. He had lost relationship with God and he’d also lost contact really with his true self. He He hadn’t been created to be fearful and hidden, but that’s what he’d become. So, God then asked the second and third questions, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Adam had just choked out the reason he was running from God. It was because he was naked and when God asked him “Who told you you were naked?” it’s as if God was saying “Adam, you’ve always been naked. Ever since I created you, you’ve never had clothes. What’s come over you and what’s changed?” Well, you know, we know when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, it says their eyes were opened. Newly acquired knowledge of good and evil, it brought with it this awful sense of vulnerability. All of humanity has been trying to cover up ever since, not just physically with our clothes, but emotionally and in every other way. We don’t want people to be able to look inside and see us all the way down to the bottom and see what we really are. There’s a comedian named Nick Griffin and he has a bit where he says, “I did go out on a couple of dates with a woman recently. She said she wants to get to know me better. I said, ‘No, you don’t.’ Women always want to know you better. I’ve got news for you, ladies. We’re not hiding the good stuff.” See, all of us are afraid that if anyone could look right down through us to the bottom, they’d never accept us. They’d never want us around them. So, we’re desperate to control what people see of us, become very skilled at covering things up. You know, this past week, I don’t know if you saw it, but Anthony Fauci, he was a prominent member of the President’s coronavirus task force during the pandemic. Might have seen him on TV almost every day back in the day and this week he was made to appear before Congress. Prior to his appearance, over a thousand pages of his personal diary were made public. See, he had made the mistake of putting personal journal entries on a government computer, which left them as fair game. Actually, there’s nothing fair about it, but they were because they could be retrieved from a government server, they were gathered up and released to the public last week and every news agency was able to dissect and display the worst of them. And what his diary showed, it wasn’t really flattering, how he very much enjoyed his celebrity status during the pandemic. He was infatuated to be rubbing stars with all the rubbing shoulders with all the beautiful people and the stars and that recognition and popularity, he said, even allowed him to mistakenly pocket dial Barbra Streisand at one time. And so, in his journal, he’s reveling at all the awards and the accolades he’s receiving. He’s soaking up the adulation like a sponge, deeply delighting in all of it. In his diary, his his ego is fully on display for everyone to see. Deeply humiliating for an 85-year-old man to have to sit through it and see all of that go out in public. But isn’t isn’t that our worst nightmare? Isn’t that what each of us fears most, having our inner thoughts, our egos, and all of our sins made public? We’re frantically sewing fig leaves all the time to cover up our nakedness. We don’t want anyone here to see us in high definition. We only want people to see the parts we want them see. All the other parts we want to keep private. So, whenever we feel superior to other people, or we use our success, or our smarts, or even our religion to feel smug and condescending, we’re really just sewing fig leaves to cover up our own vulnerability. If we can’t admit to being complicit and in companionship with fellow sinners all over the globe, we’re just going to be left like Adam, hiding in the bushes, covering up, desperately trying to avoid the gaze of God, and never wanting to be exposed to anyone else. So, God’s final question to Adam was, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” In asking the question that way, God was emphasizing, “Adam, it’s not that you’ve just broken a rule. You betrayed a relationship. Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Our our sin should never be thought of as uh clinically, like, “Oh, it’s a code violation or a bylaw infraction.” Sin really, it’s spitting in God’s face. It’s trampling on his word, and it’s casually betraying the most important relationship that any of us will ever have. When Adam was confronted so directly about his sin, he was like us. He wasn’t necessarily very quick to own it, and he wasn’t quick to move toward humble repentance. When God confronted Adam, the first words out of his mouth were, “Well, the woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” So, without much subtlety at all, Adam effectively blamed both God and his wife for his failure. “The woman you put you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree.” It’s like saying, “I appreciate God, your thoughtfulness in giving me a wife, but I think the one you gave me was a little defective. She she had a weakness. She had a glitch. But, I’ve got more ribs. If you want to make me another one, you can make me another one, but you know, how manly of Adam to say that. Lord then addressed the woman directly, “What is this that you have done?” Like Adam, she also deflected blame, and she said, “Well, the serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Both Adam and Eve, they tried to deflect blame away from themselves. It’s not a helpful step toward repentance. Author Trevin Wax says he sometimes encounters Christians who they don’t want to be like the hypocrites they see in church. They don’t want to be people who say one thing and do another, and whose smiles kind of mask their inconsistency. So, he says, “Rather than trying to live up to a difficult standard and failing, he says that some Christians lower their aim, and they really disengage from trying to live lives of holy obedience.” But, is aiming low to avoid being a hypocrite, is that what God has called us to? Trevin Wax doesn’t think so. He says, “Hypocrisy isn’t the gap between Christian ideals and our Christian life. Hypocrisy is the refusal to acknowledge that gap.” Think about that. That’s a That’s a great quote. He quotes a guy named Russ Mc- McCaughey. He says, “Are we to be a church Are we to be a church without hypocrisy, or are we to be be whose hypocrisy runs in the right direction. In other words, when we fail, will it be in pursuit of something marvelous? He goes on, growing in righteousness is daring and bold, it’s ambitious. You proclaim the victory of the cross of Christ from the outermost reaches of your sinful heart, you mop up the enemy as you go. Because Christ has conquered sin and death, you’re on offense, no matter how much the life of sanctification or growing in holiness feels like you’re on defense. He says, “There is a kind of integrity to hypocrisy. It’s the refusal to change one’s beliefs in the face of one’s weaknesses. Those who hold high ideals and yet stumble, they haven’t betrayed their convictions. They’ve refused to let their failures diminish their ideals. We will not change our aim just because we often miss the mark.” So, he says, “The real tragedy isn’t when you stumble, but when you stumble and then you rewrite what you believe to justify your fall. It’s not hypocritical to pursue holiness and fail. Hypocrisy shows up when our holy aspirations are no longer marked by humility and dependence.” So, final words, aim high, repent often. Aim high and repent often. Learning regular repentance, confessing sin, praying with humility, that’s not a sign of spiritual disease, that’s a sign of spiritual health. Now, of course, we think about Adam and Eve. Their first sin was so fresh in their lives when they were confronted by God, they had absolutely no experience or teaching or training when it came to repentance. It’s not fair for us. We know much much more about our sin than they did theirs, so it’s not fair for us to criticize them too strongly for initially deflecting blame. They were going to live long lives. Adam was going to live 930 years, meaning they had a they had a lifetime to reflect on their sin in the garden, to deepen and to mature in their repentance, to learn what it means to aim high and repent often. They didn’t do very well initially, but like us, their ongoing sin would give them ample opportunity to learn the value of and to practice real repentance. So, after asking the questions of a prosecutor, then God as judge delivered the verdict. Judgment first fell on the serpent, then on Eve and on Adam, even on the earth. Everything around was affected when that bomb went off, when humanity first fell into sin. That verdict is read in open court. We can read it in our Bibles. If we ever tire If we ever tire of the saying that God loves the sinner but hates the sin, notice the mercy that he retains for Adam and Eve, but the uncompromising judgment he pours out on the serpent, who’s the very embodiment of evil. Loving the sinner and hating the sin, that’s exactly how God operates. God asked no questions of Adam and Eve. He counsels or he asks questions of Adam and Eve. He counsels them as a father, but he doesn’t ask questions or try to compromise with the serpent. God loves to seek change in human hearts, but makes no concession to evil. So, to the serpent he says, “Because you’ve done this, cursed are you above all the livestock, all the wild animals. You’ll crawl on your belly, you’ll eat dust all the days of your life. I’ll put enmity between you and the woman and between her your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” Now, we’ll come back to that last bit in a moment, but notice that in God’s verdict, he curses two things. He curses the serpent and he curses the earth. But in his treatment of man and woman, he doesn’t speak as a curse, but the consequences of their sin are going to involve great pain and great frustration. For Eve, particularly pain in childbearing, to the woman he said, “I’ll surely multiply your pain in childbearing. In pain you’ll bring forth children.” So, one of her primary roles, childbearing, is going to be accompanied by great trials. There’ll be infertility and stillbirths and miscarriage and excruciating pain. She’ll still want children, but one source of her grief will be tied to her role as a mother. The other consequence of disobedience is stated by God like this. God said to her, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Now, that’s a difficult verse. The best way to understand it is to look at how those same two ver- two words are used together just a few lines further in the book of Genesis. In the next chapter, in fact, Genesis chapter 4 verse 7, sin is said to be crouching at Cain’s door, and he’s kind of overcome with anger at toward his brother, and God tells Cain that sin’s desire is to master him, to overwhelm him, but he must rule over his sin. So, when it says that Eve’s desire will be for her husband, it means an a desire to overwhelm and usurp his authority in her life. God’s will is still that Adam retain leadership and headship and responsibility. God is saying to Eve, you know, you’re going to chafe under your husband’s leadership, but you’re going to have to learn to live with it. Marriage is going to suffer tension because of sin. The husband’s given this role of authority, and she’s going to begrudge that authority. Now, before we modern people jump all over that, and we say, “Well, that’s not fair. That’s not right. That’s horribly old-fashioned. That’s just patriarchy. That’s why I don’t want to read my Bible because it just makes no sense.” Before we jump immediately to those things, let’s consider the way God speaks about marriage, what’s it supposed to look like in Ephesians chapter 5. This is a passage often preached at weddings. I think particularly so we can sharpen the edge of what God says to Eve in Genesis chapter 3. Sand down those edges. You probably know it. Ephesians 5 reaffirms man as the head with the woman to submit to his leadership, but it goes on to say husbands, you’re to love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So, it’s often preached in Ephesians 5 that if that’s operating smoothly in your lives as a married couple, you’ll live happily ever after. But we all know that that’s not exactly how it works out. You know, since our marriages are compared to the marriage between Christ and the church, we need to think about what Jesus gets in welding himself to us in marriage. As Tim Keller says, he gets the spouse from hell. Any frustration we feel in marriage, nothing compared to the grief Jesus must feel when he has to work with us. Tim Keller says, God is in the longest-lived, worst marriage in the history of the world. And he is. Cuz Jesus leads us so graciously and sacrificially. He’s always working to bring his wayward bride, the church, back to him. We chafe under his leadership. We bite and we scratch and we don’t want to listen to him. We do the opposite of what he tells us. We begrudge. We ignore his leadership. We don’t like to submit. As a result, our marriage to Jesus is filled with the kind of tension that God says Eve is going to feel toward Adam. But that doesn’t mean we throw marriage out the window and we treat God’s words to Eve dismissively. No, the tension and the imperfection of human marriage, that’s just a reflection of the much greater tension of Jesus marriage to the church. Now, that tension is to be endured. Hopefully, it gets reduced as we learn to trust and rest in Jesus love. And that’s sure that’s I think how how human marriages are meant to progress and mature as well. The tension reduces as trust and love develops and grows and matures. Eve receives the verdict from God on her life. It’s going to affect her role as a mother. It’s going to affect her role as a wife. Verdict on Adam is going to drastically affect his role as a worker, as a provider. To Adam, he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you you must not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil, you’ll eat of it all the days of your life. It’ll produce thorns and thistles for you. You’ll eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you’ll eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.” So, as a consequence of sin, Adam, all of his descendants, all of us, we’re not going to have easy lives. Our work is going to crush us at times. Just when it seems we’ve got things rolling properly, there’ll be an economic downturn or a pandemic or or a boss won’t like us or our team that we’ve gathered together will break up and and AI will come and it’ll radically redirect our jobs. You know, I read an article this week of a of a pastor in the San Francisco area who has created a digital artificial intelligence twin. He cloned his voice. He trained his twin using almost 2 million words of his sermons and his podcasts and his books and his texts and his emails. And his AI generated twin has learned to mimic his optimism and his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual way of speaking, his slang. And it doesn’t just regurgitate things that the pastor has already said. It maps his thinking onto new conversations so he can provide advice around the clock for his own congregation, for people he’s never met. They can just tune in to the digital clone. He told his congregation, “This is a digital version of my mind. If I’m asleep or I’m traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24/7 access to this other version of me.” This is what’s coming, I guess. And people are using it, particularly late at night when anxiety tends to peak. The pastor says, “People who who can’t sleep, they’re reaching out for some spiritual support when the church is dark.” And then he goes, he can check on the previous night’s conversations the next morning. He’s found that engagement peaks at about 11:00 p.m. at night, and that in the last few months his digital twin has been in conversation with at least 250 people. Now, I don’t I don’t want to sit in judgement on a fellow pastor’s ministry or his creativity, but I’d beware. There’s got to be some thorns and thistles that would encroach, that come disguised in the efficiency of AI. Every new technology, for all time, carries with it unforeseen consequences and ethical minefields, always bring new problems. We think there’s only solutions, but it always brings new problems. According to Genesis 3, the sweat of the brow, frustrations with work, they’re not going away anytime soon. And what may seem like a great technological advance, like AI, almost certain to be accompanied by new strains of weeds that are going to have to be dealt with. There’ll be more thorns and more thistles. God says to Adam, “By the sweat of your brow, you’ll eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, to dust you will return.” Uh mean, reality of death doesn’t seem to have been a consideration of Adam and Eve prior to their fall into sin. Now they’re facing this running countdown on their lives knowing that one day they’re going to turn to dust. The late Neil Peart who was drummer for the Canadian rock band Rush wrote a song called Dreamline with these lyrics, “We are young, wandering the face of the earth, wondering what our dreams might be worth, learning that we’re only immortal for a limited time.” See, everyone feels bulletproof and immortal when they’re young, but the man and woman they’re going to feel the creep of age and slowly closing curtain of death. Their access to the tree of life has been cut off. Their time’s limited. So, this first man and woman, sin is going to pile upon sin in their lives. They’re going to have to learn how to repent. Their relationship with God, their creator, it’s not going to be the same. They’re destined to suffer pain and bring a children into the world. They’re going to have to deal with tensions of their relationship and their marriage. Work’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be frustrating. And they’re going to age as they inch closer and closer to death and decay, dust to dust. That was the world that awaited them when they were banished from the garden, a catastrophic change from what they’d known. They’d taken this precipitous fall and the Bible would tell us that all of humanity, all of us, for all time, we’ve been roped to Adam and Eve like climbers going up a mountain. We didn’t have pitons hammered in and when they fell one by one, all of humanity fell into sin, generation after generation. Their fall takes us with them. However, as they’re trudging out of the garden, they’re like condemned criminals I suppose being led to their execution, something else is new in their lives. As they walk out wearing designer clothing that was made for them by God himself, we read, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and he clothed them. Lord God, instead of just doing away with that couple and starting over with a new set of humans, he tenderly covered this couple sinful couple’s nakedness with the skins of slaughtered animals. They couldn’t cover their own nakedness or clothe themselves. None of us can. Only God really can cover our inadequacy or nakedness. And those flimsy fig leaves that humans try to make always inadequate. We always try to cover ourselves up with fig leaves of good works or generous giving or church activities and all of them are insufficient. To cover up Adam and Eve, God killed animals. I don’t know what the animals were, maybe young lambs, made clothes of skin for them. It was necessary for the innocent to die so that the guilty might live. And two thoughts I don’t might have gone through Adam and Eve’s minds at the time. First, this instinctive horror at death. So, this is what death is. They might have exclaimed as they looked down in horror at these at these still stiff slain animals. They might have seen then sin is far worse. It’s far more consequential than they could possibly have imagined it to be. Might also been overwhelmed at the time by the mercy of God. He had told them that on the day they ate of the forbidden fruit, they would die. And part of them did die on the inside that day, but they continued to live physically with a degree of hope. Because of their disobedience, God of course had every right to take their lives, yet was nevertheless showing that it was possible for an innocent victim to die instead. So, we go back to those cryptic words that God gave to the serpent. I’ll put enmity between you and the woman, between his off your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, you will strike his heel. That phrase in Genesis 3, it’s referred to by theologians as the protoevangelium, meaning the first gospel. Why? Cuz it’s like a picture of family and and uh family is just having a nice afternoon and a venomous snake quickly comes slithering on the ground toward them. It’s coming right at them, all right at the children, right at everyone. And one man goes out after the snake and begins stomping on its head, and he’s being bitten on the heel again and again repeatedly, but he keeps going because he’s intent on saving his family. And the man’s life, it’s draining out of him, but the snake is finally crushed. He’s defeated, the family is safe. Why is that the protoevangelium, the first gospel? Because the predicted offspring of woman, the man Jesus Christ, he’d battle Satan right through to his death on the cross. He’d sacrifice himself for the ones he loved so he could effectively cover our nakedness. Romans 4:7 says, “Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.” Hebrews 9:22 says, “Without the shedding of blood, there’s just no forgiveness.” So, at the cross, Jesus was saying, “God count their sins, impute their sins to me. I’ve been struck on the heel and I’m dying, but I have crushed their enemies’ head. By my sacrifice, I’ll cover their sin.” So, Jesus identified us with us so fully on earth by his life, by his death, by his burial, where dust was already starting to turn to dust and and bacteria was already starting to win the day against his body. Of course, 3 days later, he’d burst from the tomb in glorious resurrection, so that if you and I have placed our faith and trust in him alone for our salvation this morning. We’re sure to go with him when we die. Dust to dust is not the last word on our lives. Adam and Eve, each one of us, will die physically. In Christ, death won’t be the end. In the meantime, we retain what we talked about at the beginning with that that ache of cosmic nostalgia, the intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a little trace memory of a world that was once un- unbroken. The end of the age, we get to experience what life was really meant to be for us for all time. So, let’s just turn to prayer. There’s a lot of stuff, I know, in this passage and lot of thing lot of ways that it might um impact each one of us. We’re not all taking probably the same lesson from this story, but here are some things that we could pray about for the next few moments. You might pray that you really would aim high and repent often in your pursuit of holiness. You wouldn’t just lower the standards so that you achieve what’s in front of you. Thank Jesus that he’s covered your shame on the cross. You don’t need to try to hide from him or from anyone else. You’ve been covered. And praise God that you’re currently a dispossessed king or a queen, but his plan is to restore you and bring you once again Revelation talks about that tree of life that we’re going to have access to. So, just take it. This is your personal time with God. Take a few moments with the Lord and then I’ll close us off in prayer.