Thanks Andy for uh your update this morning and for all the years of ministry and service that you’ve been involved in. We’re just we’re happy to uh to be one of your supporters here at Knox. So uh thanks for sharing. [snorts] We’re going to have an uh annual general meeting after our service today. And um one of the things we can rejoice in was the Isn’t it a good year to have a new roof on the church after all that uh wind and rain and everything that came down last night? plays havoc with my hair, that wind. So, I’m I’m just [cough] [clears throat] So, those seven verses that uh Brett read this morning, it’s uh like one of those, you know, you get those zip files emailed to yourself. It has a large volume of information on it, but to squeeze it through the restrictions of the mail service that needs to be really highly compressed. Person at the other end opens that zip file, great volume of information starts spilling out. It’s like that when we click on these first seven verses of Genesis chapter 3 because this is a highly compressed narrative. It’s fewer than 200 words. We could spend a lifetime sifting through the consequences and the contents of mankind’s fall into sin. So much about our lives and our world is explained in the seven verses that Brett read. You know, Bla1 Pascal, he was a 17th century mathematician and physicist and philosopher, really godly Christian thinker. He said that unless we understand the doctrine of sin, the original sin in Genesis chapter 3, how we’re all so radically affected by it, unless we get some glimpse of the evil in our own hearts, we’ll never understand ourselves. This is his quote. Nothing offends us more rudely than the doctrine of original sin. And yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. In other words, in the truth we’re looking at this morning, it’s conveyed in in a typical Instagram post of under 200 words. If we don’t allow it to illuminate our insides, we’re always going to be a mystery to ourselves. We’ll never know why it is that we’re capable of the love and kindness that we can give to others. But then those brutally uncharitable thoughts and behaviors that you and I have also at our worst moments, you know, the beauty and the cruelty that’s a that’s available in human nature. We’ll just be left scrambling to try to explain and justify the worst version of ourselves whenever it rears its ugly head. And we’ll we’ll have to blame other people for it. This they’re the source code of our anger and our anxiety and our unhappiness. It’s always someone else’s fault. If we do that and never see ourselves for who we really are, we we’ll be a closed book to ourselves. Without that doctrine of original sin, human nature will be seriously incoherent. So, let’s look at it this morning. And we want to approach it from three angles. One, we’ll first consider why it is that a tempter, an evil presence opposed to God, how did he manage to make it through the gates of Eden to wreak that kind of destruction in human lives? And second, what’s the vulnerability or the access point in our hearts that makes us very susceptible to that kind of temptation? And then finally, we’re going to look at what the initial response of God is to that ruinous development in his good creation, a creation that he had pronounced good. So we’ll look at the tempter, our vulnerability, God’s response. And the Bible gives us precious little information about the origin story of the serpent in our passage. whatever name he goes by. Satan, the devil, the evil one, the prince of this world, the accuser of the brethren, the father of lies, the roaring lion seeking someone to devour. You know, all those terms should give us a clue that this is very real. This real enemy that all of us have. It didn’t just happen in the garden that many years ago. It happens to us every day. So, the origin story of this evil one, it’s never clearly spelled out. we get some tantalizing hints or clues. We’re going to move through it fairly quickly. The verses are in your outline if you want to take a deeper dive. But as we began Genesis, we noticed that prior to the creation of the universe, God had created a group of heavenly beings who were subservient to his rule. They served as part of his administration or part in the heavenly realm. Theologians refer to them as the the heavenly council or sometimes even the council of the gods. Job 38:7 says, “They sang for joy when God created the universe at the dawn of man.” And it’s quite plausible that uh the reference in Genesis 1:26 where God said, “Let us make man in our image,” is a reference to that divine counsel. They’re presented in Psalms 82 and Psalms 89. They don’t rival the Almighty God. They’re created to serve him. particularly Psalm 89:7 that said, “God is greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones. He’s more awesome than all those who surround him in the heavenlies.” We looked a couple weeks ago at a prophet Micaiah’s narration of a heavenly council meeting in First Kings 22. Again, these people get together. God sends them out as his emissaries to do his work. They administer God’s rule in the heavenlies in kind of a similar way, I think, to the way we’re meant to administer God’s rule on earth to fill the earth and to subdue it and to rule over every other creature God has uh given us to rule as his representatives. Passage today then explains without explanation this being who is opposed to God, this rebel in the garden that God had created. Passage opens with these words. Now, the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. What’s remarkable really about this is that Eve doesn’t seem to have been the least surprised or the least afraid of that being. There’s a biblical scholar, Michael Heiser, and in his book, The Unseen Realm, he suggests that the Garden of Eden was God’s home on earth because we read that God would walk in the cool of the day and he would communicate. He would talk to mankind. And Heiser suggests that since it was God’s residence on earth, other council members may also have been present. And he speculates that Eve’s lack of fear or surprise in conversing with the servant may have come from the fact that she knew that she was on divine turf in the garden and that the person the the one she was speaking with was no human, no mere animal, but something divinely other. should remember that in Genesis 2, God placed the garden in the east in a specific place on earth. We don’t know what life was like on earth outside the garden. There was much more to the earth, much more to the world outside the garden that we were told to fill and subdue, but it’s possible that what lay outside the garden was quite different than what was inside. As for the serpent, his status is pretty unclear. It’s not unusual. We see that again in Job chapters 1 and two. Satan is said to come alongside the sons of God when they’re presented before the Lord. And in Job, God uh addresses Satan and says, “Where have you been?” And Satan says, “Oh, I’ve been roaming the earth as if like investigating, looking for things that are happening at ground level.” And Satan, or the Satan, as he’s referred to in Job, he’s presented first as an accuser of Job and then as a destroyer of Job’s life. He’s allowed to go after Job’s family and his finances and his health and who he is and why he’s given that limited leeway by God. It’s just not clear. However, like mankind, those heavenly beings are said to have sufficient free will to disobey, rebel against God. We see that in a couple friends that a couple things that Job’s friend Elephaz remarks in chapter 4 of Job that a human being can never be more righteous than God. God even charges his heavenly messengers, his angels with error. And he repeats that ph that thought in chapter 15 whereas says that Job, you can hardly be considered pure when God places no trust even in his holy ones. Elephas says, “If even the heavens are not pure in his eyes, how much less man who’s vile and corrupt?” So those two biblical statements suggest that God’s heavenly counsel, they’re they’re corruptible. They’re not perfect and without some degree of free will, none of us can really serve God. We would just be robots. We wouldn’t be the images that God has made us to be. So, Michael Heiser concludes, “Beings that are lesser than God, whether human or heavenly, are not perfect. The potential for error and disobedience is by definition possible. Trouble could happen in paradise.” And of course, it did. God’s decision to create free imagers like us involved that risk. Now, two very interesting Old Testament passages. We’ll look at this very quickly. They suggest the fall of Satan, that seinal event that landed him as that evil presence in the garden. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, there’s two earthly kings, the kings of Babylon and Ty, and they’re being judged for their pride, their overreach. by the descriptions given uh they show those men really they’re just copies or imitators of a greater evil predecessor whose fall had been very calamitous. So in Isaiah 14 we read that uh the Babylonian king is being addressed due to his overreach. He sought world domination. His fall is compared to an earlier prototype of one who had fallen from heaven. So we read how you have fallen from heaven. Oh morning star, son of the dawn, you’ve been cast down to the earth. You who once laid low the nations. You said in your heart, “I’ll ascend to heaven, above the stars of God. I’ll set my throne on high. I’ll sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north. I’ll ascend above the heights of the clouds. I’ll make myself like the most high.” But you are brought down to shol to the depths of the pit. So Isaiah 14, it reads like there was some kind of attempted coup among that heavenly council. And that morning star, that’s the same term used of the ones who sang at the creation of the universe. The morning stars sang that morning star wanted to be like the most high ended up being cast down to the ground. And we, you know, Luke 10:18, Jesus makes the statement seems to allude to that Isaiah passage when Jesus says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” Maybe even clearer uh reference to the origin of the evil one. Ezekiel 28, earthly king of Ty is again being criticized for his arrogance. But he too seems only like a replica of an earlier fallen creature. And this is the word of the Lord to him. You were the model of perfection, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone adorned you. You were anointed. Notice that you were in Eden in the garden of God. Every precious stone adorned you. You were anointed as a guardian cherub. For I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God. You walked among the fiery stones. You sinned, so I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, oh guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. Your heart became proud on account of your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth. I made a spectacle of you before kings. You’ve come to a horrible end and will be no more. So again, Ezekiel’s describing the downfall of a being who had been in Eden, the garden of God, once anointed and glorious. That description or location doesn’t fit the king of Ty, but much more would fit the description of the serpent in the garden. So, the rebellious earthly kings of Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28, they’re being compared to a great prior rebel who’d wanted to promote himself to the status of God, been cast down to earth. As a result, in Ezekiel, he’s banished from Eden to the underworld. So, the kings of Babylon and Ty were imitating that evil predecessor. Now similar similarly when Jesus criticized the Pharisees in John chapter 8 he unveiled the real source of their identity. They were just humans but he said you belong to your father the devil and you’re intent on carrying out your father’s desires. Devil was always operating in the background of their lives. So the serpent in Genesis 3 seems to be the prototype of rebellion against God. someone [clears throat] whether we’re aware of it or not that we have to contend with every day because all that information about the possible origin of the serpent, it’s just information. It’s just knowledge. Unless we take that and and realize ourselves that we’re in a battle. We’re in a spiritual warfare every day. We’re living in what Ephesians 6 says, a great battle with unseen forces, rulers, authorities, powers of the dark world, spiritual forces in the heavenly realm. Peter in 1 Peter 5’8, he’s very blatant when he says, “The devil continues to prowl around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” There’s American professor uh named um uh Craig Kenir. He’s a meticulous New Testament scholar. He’s written lots of exhaustive studies and commentaries on various New Testament books. And a few years ago, I worked through his two volume fairly massive work on the credibility of New Testament miracles. And tucked away in the appendices of that of that series, he includes some personal and family experiences involving miracles and demonic beings. He writes that he resisted including them because he didn’t want to be accused of just uh being biased or not objective in his study of miracles. Nonetheless, he included a few accounts, certainly not all the family experiences that he’s come to be aware of because he’s a fairly straightlaced American Bible professor. His theological training, some of it was very anti-supernal. Then he married his wife who’s from Congo Brazville in Western Africa. And through her family, he was exposed to a world of spirits and miracles that as a typical North American, he just hadn’t had much experience with. His wife, her family, they’re very well educated, primarily in France. She holds a PhD uh from the uh University of Paris. And he says that her family would generally be considered non-carismatic African Christians, people of unquestioned integrity. He says, “By virtue though of living in Africa, they may yet know some things that the West has forgotten.” One of his brothers-in-law, Emanuel, he’s a PhD in chemistry from a French university. He recounts an instance in which a boy in his Sunday school class was dying of the same mysterious illness that had already claimed the lives of the two boys closest friends. And this little boy, fearful about his own fate, confessed to the church what he had done. He said, “Then met an older man on the street, and the man had promised them that they’d all become powerful government ministers, provided [clears throat] they kept this pact secret, never told anyone else.” Then he had taken blood from each of those three boys, not voluntarily, from the youngest. And shortly after that, the oldest boy dreamed that this man and others had stabbed him. He woke up ill the next day, and he died in December. The day the first boy boy died, the second boy had the same dream. He fell sick and he died in February. And on that third day that that on the day that that second boy died, the third boy also had the same dream and fell sick. He was so afraid that he confessed to his church what he and the other two boys had done. Sunday school teachers who knew him, they fasted and they prayed during the daytime for the next nine days. And they all came together to pray for the boy. And Kenir’s brother-in-law, Emanuel, was one of those who fasted and prayed. And he said he felt the spirit so strongly as they were praying. Boy, was completely and fully healed that night. So although there’s an enemy pacing around, roaring around, looking for someone even here to devour. And we’re told we’re in this great battle with unseen forces. Ephesians 6 goes on to tell us we can equip ourselves by putting on the full armor of God including truth and righteousness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith by which we can extinguish the flaming arrows of the evil one, the sword of the spirit which is the word of God and praying [clears throat] it says on all occasions. And with that armor we can we can move through life confident knowing that yeah our enem is after us. He seeks to devour. But James 4 says, “We can resist the devil. He’ll flee from us. We draw near to God with the assurance that he’ll draw near to us.” Revelation 20 speaks of the ultimate fate that awaits the devil. In the meantime, we’re to remain vigilant. Like Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:11, he says, “I’m always quick to forgive other people and keep short accounts in order that Satan might not outwit us, for we’re not unaware of his schemes.” Well, I think our passage today shows us maybe the most basic [clears throat] primary scheme that Satan uses to try to outwit us. This is the common access point into our lives. In our passage, we have this very brief, well-known four verse conversation between the serpent and the woman Eve. Serpent initiates and he says, “Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” And of course he was misquing God. Uh God had said, “You can freely eat of all the trees in the garden, but you must not eat from the one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.” That was the only tree that was out of bounds. Everyone else, everything else was fully available. But though he’s exaggerating the prohibition of God, you can almost see the sneer on the serpent’s face. He’s not denying what God said, but by exaggerating, by extending it, he’s mocking. He’s really he’s making God out to be ridiculous. Tim Keller says that he’s seen many young people who grew up in Christian homes lose their faith in college. And he says they usually lose it through snears. A few, but not many. They don’t lose their faith through uh most don’t lose their faith through reasoned arguments and long study and thoughtful reflection. rather they lose their faith. He says because all around them their peers view Christianity as ridiculous. And Keller says for every argument he gets against the Christian faith, he gets 99 sneer. So you see how this works among people. You know, people don’t often question Christianity by doing a deep, thorough study into all it has to say about things like relationships and sexuality and marriage and the cross and faith and hell and judgment. Rather than doing any basic research, people simply align themselves with the common cultural view that what the Bible has to say about such things has to be primitive and outdated and laughable and ridiculous. Did God really say that? Did God say you can’t eat any of this beautiful fruit? That’s absurd. That’s moronic. The serpent’s question. Did God really say? It’s not an honest question at all. It’s just a manipulative way of mocking God in general. In CS Lewis’s imaginative novel, The Great Divorce, two academics are discussing faith. Both had once lost their faith, but one had since regained his. And the Christian says to his friend that when they lost their faith in college, they didn’t come by their loss of faith or their opinions honestly. He says, “Friend, let us be frank. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas. We plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At college, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks, saying the kind of things that won applause. When in our whole lives did we honestly face in solitude the one question on which all turned? Whether after all the supernatural might not in fact occur. When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith? He’s saying that the loss of their faith wasn’t based on anything profound. It wasn’t based on any deep study. It was just the snears of modernity that caused them to drift away from the Christian faith. and the snear. That was Satan’s first attack, his first seed, planting in Eve the suggestion that God’s standard for fruit consumption is dumb. It’s untenable. It’s ridiculous. It’s laughable. Now, Eve made some attempt to correct the serpent because she said, “Well, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, you must not eat fruit from the tree that’s in the middle of the garden. You must not even touch it or you’ll die.” Now, God hadn’t said, in fact, that the tree mustn’t be touched. But obviously, Eve had taken the prohibition seriously enough. She she didn’t even want to get close to that prohibited fruit. She wanted to keep her distance from anything that God said would kill her. But that provides another opening for the serpent. First, he wanted Eve to entertain the thought that God was ridiculous. And then he followed that up with a head-on lie. Oh, you’ll not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God, knowing good and evil.” Now, that passage again is a little bit ambivalent. Remember that word for God, Elohim, uh can be either a singular or a plural. It’s a word like the English word sheep. Can describe one animal or a whole herd. And we pointed out that in a single verse in Psalm 82:1, the word Elohim is used both ways, the singular and the plural. It says, “God Elohim has taken his place in the divine counsel. In the midst of the god’s Elohim, he holds judgment.” You can’t be in the midst of a of just one thing. You can only be in the midst of a group. And what the serpent said to Eve then could be taken the same way. You’ll not surely die. For God Elohim knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like the gods Elohim, knowing good and evil. The reason that makes some sense in this chapter is in verse 22 we read and the Lord God said the man has now become like one of us plural knowing good and evil may well be another reference to that divine counsel if that tracks if the plural meaning of Elohim was intended in the serpent’s words then this is what the serpent was really saying to Eve you won’t die when you eat that fruit you’ll be like the rest of us you’ll be like the holy ones like the sons of God like the divine beings you’ll be like me. I know all about good and evil. It’s wonderful to be so informed. I don’t want to live a narrow life of uh intellectual ignorance. So, why would you? Come on, Eve. Just take a little bite. And when the serpent tells Eve that she won’t die. It’ll it’s only going to broaden her horizons. What’s he telling her about God? He’s denying a fundamental element of God, an attribute of God. Denying God’s goodness, saying you can’t trust God to make you happy. And that’s the big lie behind all of our sin, each one of us. The lie that gets embedded in our hearts like the bite of a deer tick. It’s the lie that makes us all as sick as we are. And why do people says, “Well, I know the Bible says I shouldn’t be sleeping with anyone except the married spouse that I make promises to. But wouldn’t it be great to try a few other people first or or every now and again? And I know the Bible says I shouldn’t spend all my money on myself, but it would feel so good just to have more stuff and maybe do more traveling. I know the Bible says I shouldn’t carry a grudge and I shouldn’t write off the people who annoy me, but it feels so good to think about revenge and rehearse all these little snide comments that I might be able to make to them someday. See, none of those things would ever tempt us unless we already had some corruption in our operating system that tells us God can’t be fully trusted. Tells us that if we obey him to the letter, we won’t be happy. We all know Eve’s temptation very well. This is the same temptation you and I face every day. It permeates our operating system. It’s our sinful desires, that combustible material in us that needs only a little spark to uh set it fully on fire. The only reason we all sin as consistently and regularly as we do is because some part of us says, “If I obey God, I won’t be happy. I can’t trust God with something as important and fragile as my happiness.” So, the serpent gives Eve the sneer first and then the lie. Both her and Adam eat the fruit. Immediately something dies inside them. Their innocence is lost. They’re ashamed of their nakedness. In desperation, they try to hide from God. As we mentioned last week, you know that one prohibition of not eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That was their opportunity to learn how to worship God, how to make sacrifices, how to treat the world as if it was God’s gift to them, not just their own to manage on their own. they could view their lives properly in proper proportion if they just kept that one prohibition. The tree represented their choice. And we think of what’s the source of all our unhappiness, our anxiety, our greed, our improper sexual desires, our broken relationships, our problems in marriage. What’s the headarters of all that sin? It’s saying that we can’t trust God with our happiness and then putting ourselves in God’s place, saying, “If I do this, uh, it’s not going to hurt me. It’ll make me better. In fact, I’ll become like the gods. I’ll become God myself.” Only to discover that we’re very unqualified to be any kind of God in our own lives. So, we have this very real enemy. He’s out to destroy us. We have this propensity to let sin get away from us. We’re all left hiding. We’re we’re waffling between wanting to be our own God and then cowering in shame when we discover that we’re really unqualified to be that. Our hope though comes at the very end of our passage this morning. What God says in verse 9, we see a man and a woman and they’re their sin. They’re hiding in the bushes. They’re covered up with fig leaves. They’re shame quivering in fear and shame. Then they hear God say, “Where are you?” They’re hiding, but God is seeking. And we’ll flesh that out in the next week or two in the remainder of chapter 3. For now, it’s enough to know that in Jesus’ purpose in leaving heaven, came to earth, as he put it in Luke 19, was to seek and to save the lost. To find people like us, sinners who are hiding and quivering in the bushes. We’re unable to bear the weight of trying to be our own gods. We’re ashamed of the mess we made of our own lives. But Jesus comes and says, “Where are you? I’m so glad I found you. I’m going to go to the cross to be your ransom payment, pay the penalty for your disobedience. I’m going to die on behalf of people like you who are ashamed of your sin. Or maybe you’re not ashamed of your sin yet. But one day, maybe you’ll come to the end of yourself, and then you will be, and you’ll find that I’ve already done the job to provide the remedy for your sin. It’ll cost me everything to do it, but you’re worth more than all that to me. I saw paradise lost through the sin of your first parents but it’s been restored through me and I really want you to be part of it. So we said at the sp start unless we come to grips with the reality of original sin unless we receive that as being our greatest problem and accept our own complicity with it and see the fallout of sin in our lives we’ll never really understand ourselves. We’ll always be trying to be something more than we actually are. will never turn to Jesus to be healed. Original sin, it’s painful for us to admit to ourselves, but it’s our ticket to truth. It’s our ticket to be made made whole and being healed. So, we’re just going to continue in prayer together. And here are some things you might want to pray in the next couple of moments. You might want to thank God, first of all, for the armor he provides so that when you resist the devil, he’ll flee from you. God has given us the resources to resist the evil one. Pray for those you know who have rejected God with a snear. They haven’t made a deep study of uh of uh biblical issues, but they may view God and Christianity as simply being ridiculous. Pray that you’ll increasingly be able to trust God with your happiness and grow in the path of his holiness. Just take a few moments of prayer and then I’ll continue in uh in prayer as well.