Sin and Grace
Notes
Transcript
15 The Lord God took the human and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.
16 The Lord God commanded the human, “Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees;
17 but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!”
Sin and Grace
Sin and Grace
I often struggle with familiar passages from the Bible because we hear them so frequently that we think we know what they say without ever really reading them.
The passages we’ll be looking at this morning are some of those types of passages. We know the story of Adam and Eve and how sin came into this world.
We know about the snake and the temptation that he brought to Eve. We know about the sin that both Adam and Eve committed.
We know about God kicking them out of the Garden of Eden.
We know all of that. We know it, or maybe it would be better to say we know about it.
I like to think that I am an observant person. Every place that we’ve lived, I’ve observed things around that made me question why they were there. The people that lived there a long time had become accustomed to seeing things that they became just background to them. Examples might be as you’re turning right on route 30 from main street. Part way up the hill is a falling down building, what was it, why was it built? The old railroad grade fascinates me.
Some Biblical accounts can be like those things. Most people never take notice of them.
As we’ve entered into the season of lent, we’re invited to slow down and take a look these passages, theses familiar stories to learn what the Holy Spirit is wanting to say to us through God’s Word.
Lent is those 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. The six Sundays in Lent are actually feast days. Those 40 days were established in honor of the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness preparing for his 3 and a half years of active ministry and to be tempted by Satan.
The Bible says in verse 15
15 The Lord God took the human and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it.
I like this translation. The NIV and several other translations that I looked at all said that “God put Adam in the garden.” In this translation we are told that God settled him. The Hebrew word is shaqat translated rest and it means “to be at peace.” It implies a freedom from anxiety and conflict. [Radmacher]
God created Adam in His own image, holy, pure, holy love, and all other attributes of God. God then settled him in the Garden that he had prepared to be at peace.
God gave him work to do which was to tend to the garden and take care of it. God gave him everything that he needed. There was one restriction that was placed on Adam. That one restriction was the temptation that Satan used to get Adam and Eve to sin.
God told Adam in verse 17
17 but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!”
There were two specific trees planted in the Garden of Eden. The one I just mentioned and the Tree of Life. It was only the tree of knowledge of good and evil that they were prohibited from eating from.
It was the “look but don’t touch.” How many times have parents said to a child, you can look but don’t touch. How many times do we see a sign that says wet paint and we just have to touch to see if it is really wet or not.
I think that is the curiosity that we are born with. It is how we learn about life, by being curious and exploring.
This verse is the reminder of our belief that God created us a free moral individuals with free will to choose to obey God or to disobey Him. If that were not the case, then why did God need to tell Adam to not take the fruit from that one tree and eat?
Think about what God had given to Adam. He settled him in the garden. He gave him all the food that he would ever need. There was an abundance. We are told after the fact that God came and walked and talked with them there in the garden. It seems that they weren’t separated from God like we are today.
Some might argue that it was not Satan in the form of a serpent. I have a problem with that idea because God created the snakes and all other creepy crawlies. One the sixth day of creation, the Bible states Genesis 1:31 “31 God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good.”
God would not have created something evil like that serpent. It had to be Satan.
We have no idea how long after creation that this even occurs. I think it is safe to say that they had the opportunity to sample a wide variety of the fruit and vegetables that God had prepared for them. I have to imagine that everything was wonderful to eat, well maybe not spinach or Brussels sprouts.
Wilbur Williams in his commentary on this passage wrote:
Genesis: A Bible Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition Chapter 4: Adam’s Containment (Genesis 2:8–17)
The significance of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil then was not in its fruit, but in the line of disobedience she would have to cross to get to it. Eve had to choose how she would respond: with the sin of disobedience or with spiritual awakening. How would these humans respond? Would their motivation be love for their Creator who deeply cared about them, had provided for their needs and wanted them to choose Him out of love, or would they follow an inner urge for independence?
It wasn’t about the fruit. God had drawn a line which was not to be crossed. They were to enjoy everything in the garden, however, this one particular tree was off-limits.
That serpent planted a seed in Eve’s mind and she gave into it. She ate and gave it to Adam and he also ate some of it.
Williams continued writing by saying:
Genesis: A Bible Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition Chapter 4: Adam’s Containment (Genesis 2:8–17)
God was deliberately forcing Adam and Eve to make a reasoned choice between good and evil. To refuse the temptation, when it came, would provide them with the ability to discriminate between good and evil. The evil was in that to acquire the fruit, they would have to disregard the expressed will of God. God had given them free will for just this specific moment.
We know the rest of that story. She gave in to the temptation and sinned and she gave the fruit to Adam and he sinned and sin infected humanity. Death came into God’s creation.
Have you ever thought about how death came? When God sent Adam and Eve out of the Garden, he stationed angels by the Tree of Life to keep man away from it. The other tree from which the fruit was picked and eaten did not need to be guarded because the consequences had been given.
A solution was needed to reconcile man to God. Fast forward in time to Moses and God gives the law. The people were called to be holy, to be a kingdom of priests to bring the world to God. The people were unable to consistently obey the law.
God did something very unexpected. He did something that no one anticipated. The prophecy was given, a Messiah was going to come.
Jesus came as the Messiah in such an unexpected way. The people thought the Messiah was going to institute a Messianic Kingdom and he would sit on the Throne of David.
God was about doing the expected. God did something totally unexpected. They were expecting a military solution to their problems with all the foreign invaders that they had to endure. They didn’t realize that God had permitted those invasions both as punishment as well as to open their eyes and minds to what God really wanted to see happen.
I don’t know if you remember what I preached last week let alone last year, but we looked at several of the prophets in the Old Testament and we learned again what God wanted. He wanted repentance. He wanted the people to be obedient to him and to stop sinning and doing things there own way.
Why would God send a military Messiah to save Israel? God had already used the military of foreign nations and the people continued on their own path.
Look at what the Apostle Paul had to say:
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.
Why did God pick that date some 2,000 years ago? We can only speculate. Paul says “at just the right time.” He explains the right time just a little bit for us.
He says that the right time was when we were still powerless.
There is the problem.
We were powerless
We were powerless
There wasn’t anything that we could do. Further down in this chapter to the Romans Paul wrote Romans 5:12 “12 Just as through one human being sin came into the world, and death came through sin, so death has come to everyone, since everyone has sinned.”
Sin had come into the world. Everyone had sinned Romans 3:23 “23 All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory.”
Romans 6:23 “23 The wages that sin pays are death, but God’s gift is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Sin and death, the double whammy all because of what Adam and Eve did so very long ago. The Law was powerless to save because it only pointed man to God. It laid out the boundaries but as you know that since Adam we are not good about staying within the line.
Bishop Wright tells a wonderful story that illustrates this action of God.
Paul for Everyone, Romans Part 1: Chapters 1–8 (The Big Picture in Shorthand: Adam and the Messiah (Romans 5:12–17))
The sculptor was pleased with his work. It was a fine statue, and it looked good in the town square. The subject had lived in the little seaport all his life, and had become well known through organizing the coastguard service. This had turned to fame when, at great risk to his own life, he had rescued virtually single-handed a boatload of people caught off the rocks in a winter storm. The town was grateful, and commissioned a statue of him from the sculptor.
But it wasn’t long before trouble arrived. The next summer, a gang of noisy youths came to the town for a laugh. They rampaged up the little main street; they broke a couple of windows; they shouted rude words at passers-by. And when they got to the statue, they decided to have some real fun. First they daubed it with red paint. Then they threw stones at it. Then they took it in turns to run, jump and kick it with both feet in the air. After a few minutes of this, the statue, which had not been made to withstand such treatment, snapped off its base and crashed into the road, smashing into pieces. The youths fled, still laughing.
The town council pondered their response, and called in the sculptor. They were determined not to be beaten. They wanted the statue remade exactly as it had been. But the sculptor had a better idea. He would remake it all right—but in a much tougher material. It would look better, too.
He wasn’t just going to put things back as they had been. This was the opportunity to do something really spectacular.The story could go on. I like to think of the youths themselves getting into trouble in a boat, being themselves rescued by the coastguard, and coming to their senses. But we have gone far enough for the main point to emerge, which otherwise we might not spot in the middle of Paul’s dense and difficult writing.
The main point is that what God has done in the one man Jesus the Messiah is far, far more than simply putting the human race back where it was before the arrival of sin. The statue has been remade, and it is far more splendid than before. It isn’t a case of ‘what they knocked down, God will put back up’. Nor is it a case of ‘what they did wickedly, God will do graciously’. God has done far, far more.
15 But the free gift of Christ isn’t like Adam’s failure. If many people died through what one person did wrong, God’s grace is multiplied even more for many people with the gift—of the one person Jesus Christ—that comes through grace.
There is that amazing word, grace. God’s grace is multiplied through the gift that come through grace. We learned about that gift in John 3:16 “16 God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him won’t perish but will have eternal life.”
That gift came through Jesus. There is a hymn in our hymn book that has these words:
Sin and despair, like the sea-waves cold,
Threaten the soul with infinite loss;
Grace that is greater– yes, grace untold–
Points to the Refuge, the mighty Cross. [Grace]
The solution was through Jesus when he died on the cross for your sin and mine and the sins of the entire world.
We see sin overflowing the banks when the people were crying out Crucify Him, Crucify Him.
Pilate tried to get himself out the situation when he told the religious leaders that he found not fault in him.
The religious leaders said “Let his blood be on us and on our children.”
Maxie Dunham wrote
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 29: Romans The Reign of Grace
The very acts and attitudes of sin that nailed Him to the Cross were being dealt with in grace by the subjection of Christ to that cross. The Cross in its horrible illustration of overwhelming sin was in itself a demonstration of superoverwhelming grace. Sin at is blackest moment on Calvary was touched by grace at its most golden.
Have you experienced that grace in your life? There are only two options, sin or grace.
My prayer is that you choose grace.
Let us begin by looking for a revival within our hearts, minds, and souls. If we don't make an effort to teach religious values in our own homes first, it would be hypocritical of us to complain that our neighbors don't do the same. Yet once we have bowed down before God and asked Him to rekindle His work inside us, we can look around at the Church and the world surrounding us and pray for them. Pray for your pastors, pray for those who share your faith, and pray for the world which is going to hell due to its sins. "O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years! In the midst of the years make it known; In wrath remember mercy." (Habakkuk 3:2)
Radmacher, E. D., Allen, R. B., & House, H. W. (1997). The Nelson Study Bible: New King James Version (Jos 14:15). T. Nelson Publishers.
Grace Greater Than Our Sin. (n.d.). Hymnary.Org. Retrieved February 25, 2023, from https://hymnary.org/text/marvelous_grace_of_our_loving_lord