I still remember the first time I heard that… I grew up with Simon and Garfunkel’s music. Everywhere you went you heard it, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Mrs Robinson,” “The Sounds of Silence.” Shortly after I came to faith, in 1974, Paul Simon brought out a solo album called “Here comes Ryhmin’ Simon,” followed by, a live album from his world tour called “Live Ryhmin.”
The album was full of great hits that he wrote, many of them from the Simon and Garfunkel days. Then, in the middle of the second side, between “Sounds of Silence” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” there was what we just heard, this amazing performance of Andre Crouch’s “Jesus Is The Answer” by the Jesse Dixon Singers who were touring with Paul Simon.
As a new Christian, it was awesome for me to hear such a clear testimony to Jesus on an album by such a musical icon. But one thing I never asked was, “If Jesus is the answer, what’s the question?” I was a new Christian and I knew that, in my own experience, Jesus had lifted me out of isolation and placed me in a new family. He was the answer to my loneliness and pain. That was enough for me, at the time.
Over the next few weeks, as we run up to Easter, we’re going to be looking at some of the various metaphors, the word pictures, that are used in the New Testament to describe what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross on Calvary. But before we go there, there’s a question that we need to ask first. That question is, “What’s the problem?”
I’m not joking. “What’s the problem?” is an important question to ask, because the New Testament was written by people who were convinced that Jesus wasn’t just a solution to the human condition but the solution. There are so many words used to describe what Jesus did – salvation, justification, sacrifice, reconciliation, lots more – big words, long words. It makes you think that the people who wrote the New Testament thought that it was a pretty major problem that Jesus had come to deal with, one that covered a whole range of human experience.
So this morning we’re going to set the stage for our discussions over the next few weeks by looking at what the Bible says the problem is.
As I began my preparation for this message I was trying to figure out where was a good text to anchor it. When I started out I was planning on Romans 1, where Paul lays out the human condition so clearly, almost brutally, then others suggested Colossians 3, or Ephesians 4 and 5, or Galatians 5. All of those passages lay out lists of the kinds of behaviour that Jesus sets us free from. Lists like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like,” to quote Galatians 5:19-21. But, as I looked at those passages I realised again that nowhere does Paul identify these things as “the problem.” They’re actually symptoms of a much deeper problem. And, like all the truly important things in life, that problem isn’t best explained by a list of do’s and don’ts. It’s best explained by a story, the story we had read for us this morning. Genesis 3 tells us where we are and how we got here. It lays out the problem that we all have to face.
Just to remind us of
where this is in the Bible, Genesis 1 and 2 are about how God created the world
and made it good. They talk about how God made humanity and placed us on earth
to look after it and tend it. Genesis 2 ends with Adam and Eve in fellowship
with each other and with God.
Then the story turns dark. If it were a movie the background music would go all minor and brooding as the serpent appears and begins to talk to Eve, sowing seeds of distrust in her mind. “He said to the woman, “Did God really say…”
Distrust is at the core of our problem as human beings. All God asks is that we trust him. It’s what God asked of Abram when he called him away from his home. It’s what God asked of Moses at the burning bush. In John 14.1 Jesus says, “Let not your hearts be troubled, trust in God.” In John 3.36 he says, “Whoever trusts the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life.” Everything else that God asks of us; worship, obedience, service, they all grow out of this one root of trusting God. And the opposite is true too. All those lists of bad stuff in the New Testament, all grow out of the one root of not trusting God.
Our relationship with God is based on
trust. It has to be. We can’t see him. But the reality of relationships is that
trust is a very fragile thing. All it takes is believing a few words from an
enemy to destroy a relationship. A number of times in the children’s time over
the last few months,
Why? Behind all the immediate reasons there is one basic reason. We don’t trust God. We don’t trust him to provide all we need, to guide our path through life, to look after us; so we take things into our own hands, and we make a mess of it. That’s what Genesis 3 is about; our mess, our problem.
And, like Eve, when people stop trusting God they believe a lie. “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman; directly contradicting what God had said to them. G.K. Chesterton said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." We make up things to believe in to make us feel better. We tell ourselves lies so we don’t have to face the reality that there really is a God and that we have some kind of responsibility before him.
The serpent had promised Eve in verse 5 that if she ate the fruit, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” What actually happened in verse 7 was that when she and Adam ate the fruit, “the eyes of both of them were opened, [the serpent got that bit right] and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”
This is not about sex. God had already told them in Gen 1.28 to be fruitful and multiply and there’s no suggestion that there was some other way to do that before Genesis 3 that didn’t involve sex. There is nothing inherently shameful about sex, in its appropriate place.
Neither is it talking about misplaced shame. Often, in some kinds of offences, the victim ends up feeling shame as if they’ve done something wrong when in fact it’s the other person who has done something shameful.
But true shame is a good thing. We should feel ashamed when we do something wrong. It’s the spiritual equivalent of burning your finger when you touch a hot stove. It helps you remember not to do it again.
Before they disobeyed God, Adam and Eve never had anything to hide from each other. There was nothing they were ashamed of. After they ate the fruit they knew what it was like to have done something wrong, and they wanted to hide it. They were ashamed.
The serpent promised them God-like knowledge. What they got was shame.
Shame, and fear. “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God.”
People don’t naturally search for God. They hide from God. Unfortunately, often the best place to hide from God is in religion and spirituality. That’s always been the case. Much of religious thought and activity is about trying to figure out how to manipulate God not to hurt you, or to give you what you want. That’s certainly true of most tribal worldviews, and unfortunately it seeps into Christianity at various points too.
Our natural tendency is not to seek God but to try to control him or protect ourselves from him. C.S. Lewis said, “To speak of man’s search for God is like speaking of the mouse’s search for the cat.” We like to flatter ourselves that we want to know God and seek his face. Genesis 3 tells us that actually we’d prefer to hide from God and that it is God who comes looking for us. If we kept that one image in our heads, of God calling out to Adam and Eve in the garden, searching for them, it would help us immensely in understanding who God is.
And what happens when he finds them? They
start blaming others for their situation. “The man said, “The
woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman
said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.””
“It’s not my fault! He did it. It’s her fault.”
[The screenwriter’s strike in
It’s so unusual for people to not blame others. And even when it’s true that your situation is because of someone else’s actions; blaming them doesn’t actually help you move forward. If anything you only dig yourself deeper into a hole.
It gets worse. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” If our disobedience and evil only affected ourselves that would be bad enough, but, as a a writer once said, no-one is an island. What we do affects others and it affects the world around us. We talked about this a few months ago. The Bible is clear that the brokenness of creation is our fault. The whole of creation is twisted because of humanity’s fall from grace. We blew it and pulled all of creation into the gutter with us.
And because we, and all of creation, are broken, our best efforts invariably result in less than we hoped for. “It will produce thorns and thistles for you.” Even when we try our best, we fail. We pour ourselves into something and it falls apart. It could be a job, a career, a marriage even, and it falls apart before our eyes.
This is not a pretty story. Distrust,
deceit, shame, fear, blame, brokenness and failure. And finally there is
alienation. “So the LORD God banished him from the Garden
of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.”
In the space of one chapter the story has gone from everything being right to everything going wrong. From fertility and fruitfulness, to brokenness and barrenness. From fellowship and harmony to distrust and alienation.
I’ve deliberately not used the s-word so far in this message because lots of people think that “sin” is just something the church has invented to make people feel bad. It’s not. It’s simply a short description of the human condition. What it means to be human is that no matter how well things go, or how blessed our lives are, there is still this underlying problem that we don’t trust God as we should and so we experience distrust, deceit, shame, fear, etc. Our world is broken, and us with it. That’s the problem.
Recently I read a devotional on Genesis 3
by a Jewish Christian who works in the
[…Jewish and Christian commentary, and the Qur'an, all agree that Satan stepped into the garden and tempted the humans so that they disobeyed God's one commandment. But Genesis 3 does not say that: like Genesis 1, it has neither devil nor angels… The serpent is only one of the creatures over which humans have authority. We can't blame him!
We ask how a good and omnipotent God could permit evil. That suggests that we don't like evil, and maybe think we could make a better world. But this passage reflects the problem back to us. `Look at yourselves!' it says. `You worry about what God allows in his world, but you happily do what is wrong and then hide away and pretend it wasn't your fault. What is the problem of evil? You are!'
I am often tempted to think that I am different: that I am like the Qur'anic Adam, who did not really rebel but was deceived by Satan and repented as soon as God pointed out his disobedience. Or maybe I am well-intentioned though mistaken, like the Adam of some Jewish comment, who thought he would be better able to glorify God if he knew good and evil. If I were like that, Jesus could have been spared the cross - but verses 4-6 accuse me. Like Eve, I sin because I want to know and judge like God, but am motivated by my own desires. Like Adam, I sin by going along with others. Like all humanity, it takes the Holy Spirit to bring me to repentance. Genesis does not tell us whether Adam and Eve ever repented. As a Muslim colleague pointed out, Genesis leaves their story unfinished: whereas the Qur'an tells of their immediate repentance and forgiveness, it takes the whole of the Bible and a second Adam to deal with their sin.]
[In the early part of the twentieth century
the Times in
What's wrong with the world? “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”]
This is the problem that Jesus came to solve, and over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at how he did that. But you don’t have to wait that long to take advantage of what he’s done. You don’t have to wait until the end of the series. You don’t have to understand how it all works to start down the path.
We started off talking about trusting God. That’s
all he asks of us. Do you trust him? Do you want to trust him? In John 14.1 Jesus
says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in
God; trust also in me.”
We trust God by reversing what Adam and Eve did. We stop hiding from God and blaming others for our own faults. We stop telling ourselves lies to make ourselves feel better. And we turn to God and trust him when he says that, in Jesus, we can make a new start.