Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 6.1-2
Truth for Life • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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-I believe that one of the strongest arguments for the Christian worldview is that it alone gives a satisfactory explanation for the plight of humanity. Christianity answers why the world is the way it is (with sicknesses and natural disasters), why humans are the way they are (selfish and cruel), and most importantly why there is death that no one can escape.
-Hindus say that suffering and death and the like are all an illusion. That sure doesn’t cut it for the people who are suffering. Naturalism that says the universe came into being by chance has no explanation for why there is evil and troubles—it just is the way that it is. However, Christianity gives the origin for sin and evil in the world and in the human heart, and it is important to know about this inception of wickedness so that we can rightly understand the remedy for all of these ills. It all begins with a moral choice of the first humans, the effect of which spread throughout creation and has followed us through all the ages.
-We have been using creeds and confessions to review what the Bible says about important doctrines and life issues, and tonight we want to continue as we look at what brought about the inception of all this evil and problems that we have to deal with. Let’s look at…
Confessing the Faith: The 1689 Baptist Confession for the 21st Century (VI. The Fall of Mankind, and Sin and Its Punishment)
6:1 God created humanity upright and perfect. He gave them a righteous law that would have led to life if they had kept it but threatened death if they broke it. Yet they did not remain for long in this position of honor. Satan used the craftiness of the serpent to seduce Eve, who then seduced Adam. Adam acted without any outside compulsion and deliberately transgressed the law of their creation and the command given to them by eating the forbidden fruit. God was pleased, in keeping with His wise and holy counsel, to permit this act, because He had purposed to direct it for His own glory.
6:2 By this sin our first parents fell from their original righteousness and communion with God. We fell in them, and through this, death came upon all. All became dead in sin and completely defiled in all the capabilities and parts of soul and body.
-We had previously talked about God being the Creator of everything that is outside of Himself. One part of creation was special to Him—humanity.
26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.”
27 God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
-Only humanity was created as the imager of God to take dominion over creation. After God was finished with creation He stated that everything was very good—it was the way He wanted it and it fulfilled its purposes. Humanity was in perfect harmony with creation and in perfect relationship with God. It says:
25 The man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.
-Humanity had nothing to hide because they were perfectly righteous before God, and as long as the man and woman, Adam and Eve, obeyed God and His commands they would remain in this righteous, upright, perfect stated. God did not load them down with a lot of commands, this is what God gave to Adam who then was to pass it down to His progeny:
16 Then the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard,
17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.”
-There was one tree that they were to avoid. That’s it. It’s not like there weren’t a lot of choices. We’re earlier told:
9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow from the soil, every tree that was pleasing to look at and good for food. (Now the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the middle of the orchard.)
-If humanity would have obeyed God, they would have been given from the tree of life. However, it was not meant to be.
1 Now the serpent was shrewder than any of the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Is it really true that God said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the orchard’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit from the trees of the orchard;
3 but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the orchard God said, ‘You must not eat from it, and you must not touch it, or else you will die.’ ”
4 The serpent said to the woman, “Surely you will not die,
5 for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
-The confession says that Satan used the craftiness of the serpent, but it might be better to see Satan as the serpent himself, more crafty than any other creature in heaven and earth. He deceived Eve into disobeying God, and then Eve seduced Adam to follow suit. When we look at what Scripture says, the blame for this fall actually is placed on Adam, not Eve. It is recognized that Eve was deceived, but Adam was responsible.
13 For Adam was formed first and then Eve.
14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, because she was fully deceived, fell into transgression.
-Eve may have been deceived, but Adam was the first human and given the responsibility for obedience. He did not have to give in to what Eve offered, but he willfully chose to break God’s laws. Although the word covenant isn’t used in the first chapters of Genesis, there was a covenant between God and Adam with a stipulation, a promise, and a threat. The stipulation was to obey God and not eat from the tree. The promise was life. The threat was death. With the fall humanity died spiritually immediately and the process of physical death was begun. So, by eating from the tree not only did Adam disobey God, he broke covenant with God. That covenant was made with Adam before Eve was formed, and so Adam was the responsible party.
-But Adam and Eve were not the only ones to suffer, because as the second paragraph reads, when Adam and Eve fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, we fell in them. The covenant was broken, sin and death were introduced to God’s image bearers, and that is passed down from generation to generation. We are born with a nature that is now defiled in body, mind, and spirit. With this defilement comes the tendency to sin against God, and we jump right headlong into that. The corruption is passed down from this first Adam. Paul hits this point hard in Romans 3: when he says:
10 just as it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one,
11 there is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, not even one.”
13 “Their throats are open graves, they deceive with their tongues, the poison of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood,
16 ruin and misery are in their paths,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
-All of that comes from what happened in the Fall. And there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Every human being is born in this first Adam with all the curses and consequences that come with it. That is why we needed a second / last Adam to undo the damage caused by the first Adam. Paul makes this contrast:
12 So then, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all people because all sinned—
13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world, but there is no accounting for sin when there is no law.
14 Yet death reigned from Adam until Moses even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam (who is a type of the coming one) transgressed.
15 But the gracious gift is not like the transgression. For if the many died through the transgression of the one man, how much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man Jesus Christ multiply to the many!
16 And the gift is not like the one who sinned. For judgment, resulting from the one transgression, led to condemnation, but the gracious gift from the many failures led to justification.
17 For if, by the transgression of the one man, death reigned through the one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ!
18 Consequently, just as condemnation for all people came through one transgression, so too through the one righteous act came righteousness leading to life for all people.
19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man many were constituted sinners, so also through the obedience of one man many will be constituted righteous.
20 Now the law came in so that the transgression may increase, but where sin increased, grace multiplied all the more,
21 so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace will reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
-Jesus Christ came to undo what has been done and bring humanity back to what it was originally intended to be. But you must repent and believe in Him to be in this second Adam. Everyone is born under the curse of the first Adam—everyone is born spiritually dead and physically dying. And if you physically die still under the curse of the first Adam, then you experience the eternal penalty. But if you believe in Jesus, you are placed under covenant of the second / last Adam, and eternal life, the life promised by that tree of life, is given to you.
-The problem is that a lot of people don’t want to hear that they are born into sin and their nature is corrupted. But if you don’t understand the sickness, you aren’t going to understand the solution. We need to pray that the bad news of being in Adam will open up hearts to hear the good news of being in Christ.