Genesis 3 | You Done Messed Up

If you have a Bible, grab it and open it to the book of Genesis. If you don't have a Bible, you can use a pew Bible in front of you. If you don't own a Bible, we would love for you to just keep that Bible; that's our gift to you. We would love for you to have a copy of God's Word that you can flip through and look at. Genesis is the very first book in your Bible. Chapter 3 is a big number, and we'll be looking at the entire chapter this morning.

I'll read the entire chapter for us and then we'll pray. Last two weeks, we've seen God create the world and create man. Now we get to see the inciting conflict that then defines the rest of human existence.

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’” “No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” The man replied, “The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate.” So the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” So the Lord God said to the serpent:Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. He said to the woman:I will intensify your labor pains; you will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you. And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’:The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living. The Lord God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them. The Lord God said, “Since the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not reach out, take from the tree of life, eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God sent him away from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming, whirling sword east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life. — Genesis 3:1-24 (CSB)

Lord, as we look at this tragedy, we ask, Lord, that you would give us a sober-mindedness, a true conviction of sin, and a true everlasting hope. We need your Spirit to help us to do this. So we ask for his help now in Jesus' name, amen.

What makes a good story? Life oriented itself around narratives. Whenever someone shares their testimony or their own personal story, there's always an arc. If you go and watch Superman, there's always a similar pattern to every single story, every single film, every single novel that you read. There's a setup, there's a conflict, there's a climax, and then there's a resolution. And the conflict may be the most important part of the story because the conflict explains a tension that exists for the rest of the book. It justifies the story's existence. Why is there a story to tell to begin with if there isn't something to get solved, something to get resolved, something to be explained, something to get fixed?

Here in Genesis 3, we see the inciting conflict of a story, not just of Genesis, not just of the Bible, but of the entire world. Everything that brings remotely anything negative in your life can be traced back to this moment in Genesis 3. Moses writes this so that we can understand how in the world we got here. As he writes to Israelites before they enter into the Promised Land, he explains the genesis of all the sin that we have been permanently stained with in our life, in our culture, in our world. And in particular, this story tells us three things that happened that led to the desecration that we live in every single day. How did we get here? Three things happened. First, we were convinced. Second, you and I, we were cursed. And lastly, we were cast out. We were convinced, we were cursed, we were cast out.

We Were Convinced: The Serpent's Deception

Let's start with point number one: We were convinced. Look at verse number one again with me:

Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” — Genesis 3:1 (CSB)

After two chapters of setup, chapter 3 begins with the introduction of the antagonist in the story: the serpent. This serpent is created to be cunning and wise, and he comes to the woman with an intent to try to deceive her. And deception is a tricky thing. Have you ever tried to sincerely change someone else's mind about something? The serpent's strategy is more trickery than just a debate. He doesn't lay out a table in the Garden of Eden with a sign that says, "Sin is good, change my mind." It doesn't start with denial; it doesn't go directly at Eve and try to convince her straight away. He begins with a question, "Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in the garden?"

And this question is an absolute masterstroke of deception. The serpent questions the authenticity of what God says, "Did God really say," in order to get Eve to start listening to his own voice. How would you answer that question? If someone were to ask you what God actually says or not, how would you respond? Would you respond with what God means to you? Your own feelings, or your own perception of what God may be like? Maybe your own feelings about what's really just or correct? Maybe a voice that you've claimed to have heard inside the depths of your own soul? What we see in this book is that the only way to answer what God really said is to really know what God says.

But the serpent doesn't just question what God says; he also distorts what God said. Do you notice what the serpent does here? He deliberately misquotes God here. The serpent states as a command that God said that you can't eat from any tree in the garden, and you may say, "Well, God said that you can't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," which is absolutely true. But that's not all that God commanded.

The serpent isn't just trying to confuse Eve about whether or not she can or cannot eat from one tree, but whether she can eat from any tree. God's command didn't begin with a command on what not to eat, but on what Adam *can* eat, and that's really important. Genesis chapter 2, verse 16, just earlier in this book, says:

And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.” — Genesis 2:16-17 (CSB)

"You are free to eat from any tree of the garden." That's what God said, but the serpent quotes God as saying, "You can't eat from any tree in the garden." It's the exact opposite of what God said, and more importantly, it shifts the emphasis of God's command. Last week, I talked about how God's commands always begin with blessings and then obedience. Satan, in reframing what God is saying, begins exclusively on a rule. He changes it to a restriction, one law for humanity to follow, and asking this single question, Eve then tumbles over into the serpent's trap.

You could read from verse 2 with me:

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’” — Genesis 3:2-3 (CSB)

Eve tries to correct the serpent's error, but makes another mistake along the way. She corrects the serpent in saying, "You can eat from any fruit," but she adds to God's command. Eve claims that God said, "You must not eat it or even touch it." Did God say that? No, he didn't. He said, "Don't eat." Eve says, "Don't touch."

You see, both Eve and the serpent get God's command wrong, and both Eve and the serpent also get God's intention wrong. Behind a command is more than just a command; there's a point. A father tells his daughter's date to bring her back home by 10. The guy winks at the father and says, "Don't worry, I'll bring her back by 9:30." He obsesses over the time without realizing that the father's point is, "I need you to treat my daughter with respect and understand that she's under my authority and care. I'm asking you to be responsible with her."

There's the command, and then there's the purpose behind the command. But Eve makes the same error that the serpent does in tunnel visioning on what she can and cannot do. She also fixates on this tree. She's so concerned about not disobeying this command that she's obsessed about it. In fact, she's built a hedge around this command based on her own standards of what is good, and she's elevated her own perception of the dangers of this fruit to the level of God's. In other words, Eve became a legalist. Her legalism led her to add to God's rules and find her security in her ability to follow these rules.

You see, the danger of legalism is that when you've based your hope on your ability to follow *your* standards, it ignores God's goodness. She knows what she said about the tree in the middle of the garden: "You can't eat or touch it." If you know your Bible, if you paid attention last week when you looked at chapter 2, how many trees are in the middle of this garden? There's two. There's a Tree of Life, but Eve is so scared of messing up, she can't see the goodness of what God actually gave. In her effort to avoid God's judgment, she ignores God's goodness, his good intention, his good instruction. It's with this tunnel-visioned ignorance, this obsession over rules, it's in that space that the serpent strikes in verse 4.

“No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” — Genesis 3:4-5 (CSB)

Satan has evolved into denial. The serpent tackles the goodness of the law-giver. God isn't giving this command because you'd actually die. In fact, you will certainly not. He's doing it because God is insecure. He's threatened. He doesn't want you to become like him. You see what the serpent's doing? He's not just denying the truthfulness of God's command. This is not a purely rational argument. He's questioning the very goodness of God. What's God's real intention for you in giving this rule? His own insecurity. He's a petty king. He's threatened by you. He doesn't want you to be like him.

Eve's response should have been, "Serpent, what are you talking about?" Genesis 1:26 or 27 tells us, we're already like him; we're made in the image of God. But she doesn't do that because her knowledge of God wasn't connected to the goodness of God. And now Satan successfully gets her to question the goodness of a law-giver. Have you ever felt restricted by rules? When you're a legalist, the rules that you make aren't just restrictive; they're oppressive. Because the rewards of obedience are not tied to the consequences of disobedience. It separates the garden from the tree. It splits the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from the Tree of Life. And as Eve fixates on what she can't have, the rules that she constructed around her start to fall apart. God begins to look bad, and in exchange, the fruit begins to look good.

Look at verse 6:

The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. — Genesis 3:6 (CSB)

Every single word in this verse bears a ton of weight. Did you notice the words that are used to describe this fruit? She looks, and the fruit was good. It was delightful. It was desirable for obtaining wisdom. When you're suffocated by the bounds of these rules, rejecting rules, also known as lawlessness, taking off those chains begins to look good. This forbidden fruit starts to look attractive. You see, lawlessness, rejecting rules, and legalism, living by rules—they both come from the same root problem. Whether you're obsessed with following rules or obsessed with running from rules, you're still obsessed with the rule, and you still hate the law-giver. Think about the prodigal son. He runs from his father, his older brother stays with his father. Both of them hate their father.

Eve's sin didn't start when she eats the fruit; it didn't start with her hands, it started with her heart. She stopped loving God. She started loving sin, and she desired it, and that desire resulted in her action. So she takes it, she eats. She also gives the fruit to Adam, who, by the way, was there for the whole conversation, it seems, and didn't do anything. He also eats. Instead of becoming like God, they both become sinners.

We Were Cursed: The Shame and Judgment of Sin

You see, the consequence of it right away there in verse 7:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. — Genesis 3:7 (CSB)

Last week I talked about how chapter 2 ends with both Adam and Eve naked and not afraid. They're completely pure. Their intentions are so clean that they're able to be completely uncovered and unashamed at the same time, and the first thing that enters into the world after they eat this fruit, that they thought would bring them wisdom, was shame. Because that's exactly what sin does. It promises a mirage of happiness while handing you misery. The promise of self-fulfillment and achievement, while stealing dignity and meaning and purpose. And this sin happened because Eve and Adam were convinced to exchange what is good for what is evil, a real shame from sin.

So this sin didn't just bring shame; it also brought judgment. Not only were they convinced, point number 2, we were cursed. We were cursed. Look at verse 8:

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. So the Lord God called out to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” — Genesis 3:8-11 (CSB)

Before Adam and Eve lived in the garden with God in complete peace. And now at the sound of the Lord, they run, they flee from him, because they're afraid of him. Adam tells God that he's afraid because he was naked. God responds by asking whether he ate from the fruit. Now let's be real, God knows. God wasn't walking around the garden wondering where Adam and Eve went, like a parent who already saw the broken cookie jar; they know what they're doing. God knew exactly what he was doing when he was asking. He was trying to draw Adam out to express what happened, to take some accountability, be honest about the wrongdoing that occurred. But instead of acknowledging that wrongdoing, Adam begins to shift the blame in verse 12.

The man replied, “The woman you gave to be with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate.” So the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” — Genesis 3:12-13 (CSB)

"The woman you gave to be with me." The woman does the same thing: "It was the serpent who deceived me." Both of them point to others as to why they sinned, why they made that error, why they fell into deception. And the thing is, neither of them immediately answered God's question. God asked why they took the fruit? No, he asked *whether* they did take the fruit. And yet they are eager to try to justify themselves. None of these reasons that Adam or Eve have have any ounce of personal accountability. It always begins in the passive tense: "The woman, by the way, who you gave me, gave me the fruit." "The serpent deceived me." The thing that's happening here is that Adam and Eve aren't repenting. They decided instead to opt into the blame game. Point to someone else who's a little worse than me.

And who's guilty in this story? All of them. Because blaming others doesn't make you blameless. That's not how it works. When they sinned, they try to shift the focus away from their own sin. It's a slick move to try to shift someone's focus away from yourself and onto someone else that you may consider to be uglier than you, more sinful than you, but you're avoiding your own personal accountability. And trying to excuse their own sin, Adam and Eve start to act like the serpent: deceptive. You see, the truth of sin is not just wrongs that others have done to us. Sin is something that you and I have all done ourselves. We have personally committed it.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; — Romans 3:23 (CSB)

More than that, James 2, verse 10 tells us that if you're guilty of breaking one law, you're guilty of breaking them all.

For whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all. — James 2:10 (CSB)

God never asked them why they did what they did. He asked them, "What did you do?" He didn't ask what others did. He asked, "What did *you* do?" True repentance doesn't try to slither away from personal ownership and accountability. True repentance doesn't begin with, "What did that other person do to me?" It begins with, "What have *I* done?" How can you stand before a holy, good God? Judgment isn't just an unjust condemnation. It's a consequence of a right assessment of what we are. We are guilty. God curses all parties here as a result of their sin.

It begins in verse 14:

So the Lord God said to the serpent:Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal. You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life. I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. — Genesis 3:14-15 (CSB)

God curses the serpent and by extension, curses evil. This snake is now cursed to slither on his belly for all the days of its life, and there will be hostility between the serpent and the woman, between their offspring. And in doing so, God separates between good and evil and promises that God will put a final end to evil itself. The seed of the woman will crush this serpent's head, and that motif has run through all Scripture. We talked about that in the overview sermon on Genesis, and we will turn back to this later in the sermon. Let's continue on.

The serpent gets cursed. The woman also gets cursed there in verse 16:

He said to the woman:I will intensify your labor pains; you will bear children with painful effort. Your desire will be for your husband, yet he will rule over you. — Genesis 3:16 (CSB)

The woman is cursed in two ways. Her womb is cursed with painful labor, and she will have a desire for her husband, which is kind of like a weird way of wording it, but to help us understand what that means, in chapter 4, verse 7, when God talks to Cain, he says that sin's desire is for you—exact same phrase. Here, the woman's desire is for her husband. In other words, this desire is not like a wanting, romantic longing for your spouse. This is about a desire to dominate.

And I just want to make a quick side note, this is not introducing submission to the husband's authority. This is not like Adam wasn't leading this marriage before the fall happened. It's interesting that in 1 Timothy 2, when Paul talks about why women aren't to teach or exercise authority over men in the church, he doesn't reference this verse at all. He does reference creation. He references how Adam was created first and how Eve sinned first, but he doesn't talk about this verse in relation to why a man exercises authority over his wife. I think the reason why Paul doesn't do that is because male leadership is actually part of God's good design. It wasn't a result of the fall. It's not like women are submitting only because sin entered the world. It was actually part of the good design. What enters in as a result of the fall isn't the idea of submission, but the idea of rebellion. That sin would corrupt us in such a way that this good structure of complementarian leadership becomes corrupted. The woman's desire will be for her husband, yet he will rule over her. She will want to dominate her spouse, but she won't be able to, and she will have to submit to her head. In other words, this marriage relationship that Eve has with her husband is now affected by sin: contrary desires, friction, the angst that arises when your spouse just won't do the thing that you want them to do.

But the woman isn't the only one who's cursed. The man is also cursed as well, verse 17:

And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’:The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” — Genesis 3:17-19 (CSB)

This ground, this earth, is cursed as a result of the covenant head. Adam is a ruler of the earth. He is commanded to fill the earth and subdue it. He names the animals. This guy is king over this domain under the King of Kings. Because he is cursed by sin, everything under his authority also gets cursed by sin. The ground is cursed as a result of his sin. He works the ground, and it produces thorns and thistles.

See, for the woman and for the man, we talk about this pattern that exists in Genesis over and over again. If you catch the rhythm of what's going on, creation follows this pattern of forming and filling. You form and you fill: light, sun, moon and stars, seas and skies, sea and sky animals, land of vegetation, animals and man. Forming, filling. It also occurs with what Adam and Eve are called to do: fill the earth, subdue it. You have filling and forming that are going on there. And now in the curse, this image of God has been also corrupted and cursed. The woman is cursed in her filling the earth with children; it is painful. There is painful labor in filling this earth. And the man is cursed in his forming of the ground as he works. There is painful labor in both cases. What God has designed humanity to do, they have been cursed in their doing. You're still called to do it. You still bear children, they still work the ground. And yet humanity is cursed in their original purpose. It is stained with sin, and humanity is cursed to die. He was formed from the dust. He is cursed to return back to the dust because that is what sin does. It destroys what God has created, and all of us are cursed with that sin, with these judgments from God.

We Were Cast Out: Separation from God

Not only are they cursed in their person, they are also cursed with where they are located. I think this is the last thing that happened: We were cast out, point number three. We were cast out. Look at verse 20:

The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living. The Lord God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them. The Lord God said, “Since the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must not reach out, take from the tree of life, eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God sent him away from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming, whirling sword east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life. — Genesis 3:20-24 (CSB)

Man and woman can't have access to this tree. If they eat from this tree, they live forever. So they are cast out of this garden. God sets a cherubim, this angel with a flaming sword, to guard the entrance back into the garden because sin doesn't just corrupt who you are, sin also separates. It divides between good and evil. God is holy, and he will not be in the presence of unholiness. And so Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden. You see, when Adam gets created from the dust and God breathes life into him and places him into the garden, and now as a result of sin, he is being displaced. He is now a refugee in the wilderness.

All of us, all of us human beings, are not where we're supposed to be. We're all exiles, kicked out of the garden that we were supposed to be in. Cursed with sin in our souls and sinners, you and I, we're all cursed to die. That's a result of sin entering the world, the result of Adam and Eve falling into this sin. All of us as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve have been cursed with this kind of sin.

The Hope of Redemption: Christ Our Substitute

So what kind of hope do we have? Hope is actually in this chapter. It's found in verse 15, it says:

I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. — Genesis 3:15 (CSB)

Notice what God's promising here. He's saying that this offspring, the "seed" is the word that he's using, will crush the head of the serpent. The woman will have offspring that will put evil to an end, that in the midst of so much darkness, God's promise actually pierces through. There will be a day when the serpent is crushed and evil is defeated. It's no wonder that Adam decides to name his wife in verse 20, Eve, the mother of all the living. I mean, think about everything that just happened in this chapter. If I was Adam, I'd be a little pent up and tempted to call her "Death," the mother of all dead things, the arbiter of destruction. But he doesn't do that. He calls her the mother of all the living.

Not just because she will give birth and life to other people and humanity will continue to live on, but because through her will come the hope of life itself: final redemption, a defeat of the serpent and an end to suffering once and for all. It's no wonder that God clothed this man and the woman with skins, because covering their naked shame would take more than just a do-over. It would take more than just some fig leaves. It would require sacrifice. An animal had to die. Sacrifices would have to be made.

The good news for us as Christians is that we know exactly what that sacrifice was. Jesus made that sacrifice, one born of a virgin, which means that he's not under Adam. He's a new Adam, unstained with sin. He's the one who lived a perfect, sinless, obedient life. And where Adam failed, Christ succeeded. The true and better Adam, like we just sang, "come to save the hell-bound man."

On the cross, Christ as the true sacrifice bears the wrath of God on behalf of sinners like you and I. He hangs on the tree, this cursed tree of God's judgment. He wears a crown made of thorns and thistles. He is bearing the curse of sin on his own body as an innocent man, a perfect substitute for you and I. As truly God, he is able to make a payment that is so full, so complete, that he is able to completely undo the penalty of sin for anyone who trusts in him. And the proof of that payment, that fullness of his sacrifice after his death, is that three days later, he rises from the dead, completely undoing the curse of sin itself. He certainly died, and three days later Jesus certainly rose, unraveling the curse of sin itself in the hands of the true and better Adam. This is the hope that all Christians have. This is the hope that Paul understood in 1 Corinthians 15, verses 21-22, where he said:

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man. For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. — 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 (CSB)

New fathers that define all of humanity: in Adam we die, in Christ we live. This promised seed, who does what we can never do, who forgives us of our sin, that if you turn from your sin and trust in this Christ, he covers you with his righteousness and he renews you, he makes you whole, he makes you new, transforms you into the image of himself that we are in a new humanity.

Freedom from Legalism and Lawlessness

See what frees us from this pendulum swing between legalism and lawlessness, this hamster wheel of never being good enough, is Christ. Because Jesus fulfills the law where you and I never could. You can toil for the rest of your life, you can come to church every single Sunday, and you will still not be good enough for God. You could run to the darkest crevices of this earth, and God will still find you and judge you correctly for all the wrong that you have done. The only hope that you and I have is not that we get to fulfill the law again, or even that Christ would give us some second chance that we can mess up, but that Jesus has to do what you and I can't do. Where we fail, Christ obeys.

Christ has to pay that cost, and more than that, he restores what's been broken with sin. He reunites us in a good relationship with God the Father. There's no reason to hide from the Father because when the Father sees us, he sees the Son. You realize that that means that when God looks at you and you've been covered by the Son's blood, that there is not a single ounce of condemnation in the Father, there is not a single drop of stain of sin. It's not even that weird shade of a stain that's been cleaned off of a cloth; you are completely washed clean.

That also means that our heart of stone has been replaced with a heart of flesh. It means that we're truly free. Jeremiah 31 says that God would write the law on our hearts:

“Instead, this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days”—the Lord’s declaration. “I will put my teaching within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will one teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest of them”—this is the Lord’s declaration. “For I will forgive their iniquity and never again remember their sin. — Jeremiah 31:33-34 (CSB)

See, true freedom for the Christian is not a freedom to go sin. It's not a freedom to get forgiven so that you could be on straight to this tree and eat it again. True freedom for the Christian is freedom to see God rightly, to worship and delight in Him as a true desire of our hearts in a way that Jesus is so good that sin becomes bitter. Have you trusted in this Jesus? Have you been able to see the finished work that He's done for you? Are you sick of the clutches of sin that grip your heart? Then stop focusing on just your sin and expand your gaze to see the risen Christ. Reach out to Him, take and eat from His grace, and find true everlasting salvation.

Conclusion: Hope in a Risen Savior

We don't gather here on Sundays because we're a people driven by guilt. We gather here because we're a people of hope, because we believe in a risen Savior who has crushed the serpent's head. We hope as a new people, as a new creation in this church, because you and I are a pocket of a new creation, of this Edenic hope in this new Jerusalem that we're looking forward to in the midst of a broken world. You and I may suffer now. Our bodies are still cursed with the consequences of sin in this life. But remember, friends, you and I are one with Christ. If you've been united with Him with this serpent crusher, that means that Jesus will always come through on His promises. Even the sting of death will only be a means by which you obtain eternal life. And in Christ, we can trust God's complete promise in Romans 16, verse 20.

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. — Romans 16:20 (CSB)

I don't know how you felt last week if you felt like I did. Satan feels like it's always prowling around. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just feel cursed. Dark clouds of condemnation. And the promise of the gospel is not just that you get to look up at Christ, but that in Christ, you can look below your own feet and see that Satan has already been defeated. There is no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus. This tree has no bearing on you. And when you read the description of the new heavens and the new earth in Revelation, and you see the description of two trees, and their leaves of both trees are for healing the nations, you can know that in Christ, the promise that He gives leaves zero condemnation for you. And we look forward to that day. Trust in that Christ and follow after Him.

Let's pray. Lord, we pray that You would help us to take sin seriously, help us to be broken-hearted by the consequences of sin, help us to be convicted and connect sin with death, this tragedy of rejecting Your goodness, exchanging it for this mirage of goodness. Help us, Lord, to see that You are the true and better way. Help us, Lord, to trust in Christ who is better than all sin. And we thank You, Lord, for Christ's finished work for us on the cross, that we can find all our hope in Him. Pray this in Jesus' name, amen.