Paradise Lost: A Future And A Hope

And he came up with wonderful alliteration for each point.

Those of you who remember Vic would know that was one of his trademarks.

How I so deeply appreciate that brother, and I couldn't think of anyone better to lead us in a time of remembrance.

Oh, how marvelous! Oh, how wonderful is our Savior's love for us.

We're going to be talking actually a little bit about that this morning.

We're going to be finishing up our study in the early chapters of Genesis.

And we complete chapter three with that very note, oh, the faithfulness and the goodness and the grace of God, who gives mankind in the midst of our sin and in the midst of the condemnation of our sin, he gives us a future and a hope.

So we've been working our way through the first three chapters, and particularly with the third, we saw that Adam and his wife entered into a very dangerous dialogue.

A dialogue with the enemy of their souls, a dialogue with the enemy of God.

It is never a good thing to enter into a dialogue with the enemy.

The enemy whispered into their hearts and their minds questions about the goodness of God.

Did God really say this?

He knows that if you do this, then you'll be like him.

And doubts, suspicions, questions about God were whispered into their being, and they listened.

And as a result, they came to this horrible, unthinkable conclusion that God was not sufficient, that God was not good, that he didn't really care about them, he didn't really know what they needed, that they needed more, they knew better than God, and so they took the tree which God had said, you can have all of the rest, but not of this tree, and they ate with all of the consequences involved in that.

At the core of our sin, at its very heart, is an insidious idea that we know what we need better than what God knows about what we need.

And that God must be withholding something good from us.

At the core of sin is that attitude of our heart.

It was their attitude, and in various insidious ways, it's the attitude of our heart as well, that led to their descent from paradise to paradise lost.

And so then God approaches them.

There's this confrontation between Adam and his wife and God.

And he comes not thundering condemnation, but probing and asking questions.

If you were here when we talked about that, the the way we should read and hear God's voice in that section of chapter 3, verses 7 through 13 is where are you?

What's happened?

What's happened?

Do you know where you are?

How did you get here?

What he was trying to do was to elicit from them a realization of what they had done.

To draw forth from them an acknowledgement of where they're at.

And that is what God is always seeking to draw forth from us.

Because his intent with those questions was that they would come to him in repentance and asking forgiveness.

It's really pretty simple, folks.

That's what God wants from us in our sin to acknowledge.

And if they had, if they had had the ability to say, Oh, God, forgive me, they would have almost certainly experienced, well, they would have experienced the forgiveness of God.

The consequences of their sin they would still taste.

But they could taste the bitter consequences of their sin with the sweet flavor of God's grace and forgiveness on their lips, on their tongue.

Just as we may.

We will and do experience the consequences of our sin.

But by the grace of God and by the blood of the Lamb, we can be forgiven.

Forgiven.

Forgiven.

That's what the desired outcome of the confrontation was: the loving, gentle, patient interaction with God.

Well, they would then have to, because they their hearts were hardened, and our hearts get hard.

My heart gets hard sometimes.

Yours does.

They resisted what God was saying, they resisted what God was doing.

And so they then needed to experience the consequences of their actions.

You know, we can choose, we can choose to go our own way.

God did not force Adam and Eve.

He didn't make them robots.

He didn't compel.

And he doesn't compel us either.

We can choose.

We can choose to go our own way.

What we cannot do, my friends, is choose to avoid the consequences of our sin.

And that was just the reality of what happened to them.

And so now God comes to them and he starts with the serpent and he explains the consequences to the serpent and then to the woman and then to Adam.

And paradise was now lost, and instead of the blessing of God that he had intended in this perfect environment, they would experience struggle and anguish and blood, toil, sweat, and tears.

Separated from God, separated from one another.

The awful, existential, unavoidable consequences of sin.

Now, that is not the end of the story.

That is not the end of chapter three.

What we have in the verses before us, 20 to 24, just four or five simple verses, what we have is God in three subtle, subtle ways.

You could easily skip over these verses and you would miss something so important.

In the midst of our sin, in the midst of the consequences of our sin, God reminds us that He is not finished with this world yet.

And I trust that as we work through these simple verses, you'll be able to catch the spirit of all of those.

So what we have is a verse, verse 20, that describes Eve getting a new name.

And then verse 21, we have a reference, a revelation that God gave Adam and Eve new garments.

And then in verse 22 to 24, a strange but gracious act of God, which I hope you will understand by the time we get done here, in which he points them to a future and a hope.

And the theme of this, as far as I'm concerned, as I'm understanding it, is captured in Jeremiah 29.

It's one of many places throughout the scriptures, but I love the way it's put.

God speaking to his people Israel is applicable beyond just the nation Israel.

I know, I know the plans that I, God, have for you.

And my plans for you are for good and not for evil.

To give you a future and hope.

And so the closing phrases of this dark, dark passage are words of hope and the fact that God is still involved.

So let's let's walk through this.

Verse 20.

A new name.

The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all the living.

Now it'd be really easy to pass quickly over this, kind of a filling verse or a throwaway verse.

Please don't throw verses away.

I believe this simple verse is filled with something very, very significant.

We might not catch this if it were not for the rest of Scripture.

But follow along with my thoughts.

Eve, very interesting.

Don't know if you ever thought about that.

This is the first time we know the woman's name.

Okay?

First time.

Now, maybe that's by chance.

I don't think so.

So up until now, verse 27, she was called female, male and female.

And God created a female.

Chapter 2, verse 18, she's called a helper who corresponds to Adam.

In chapter 2, verse 22 and 23, she's called woman.

Verse 24, 25, and part of chapter 3, she's called his wife.

But she's never called by her name until Adam gives her her name.

And the name he gives her is very significant.

The mother of all the living.

Eve.

When we hear Eve, we just hear a name, or we might think of morning and evening or something like that.

For us, that doesn't conjure up anything, but in the Hebrew language, to the original hearers, when they heard Eve, there would be a verbal consonance.

The word Eve sounded like the word for living and the source of all living, the mother of all things.

Her name points to the very fact that there's a future for the human race.

Now the interesting thing is that this isn't the case yet.

At the time that Adam gives his wife the name Eve, and of course Adam had been assigned, we've seen it in earlier chapters, to examine all of creation around him, all of the animals, and to assign a name to them.

And when he placked the word Ardvark on that animal, apparently it had some kind of significance, don't ask me what.

But in the Hebrew context, words, names typically had meaning.

And when Adam spoke of the woman as the mother of all of the living, that was a statement about the future.

In fact, she wasn't even pregnant yet.

That didn't happen until chapter 4, verse 1.

Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.

So this was all future.

Where did Adam get this idea that she would be the source of all living?

Well, Adam had done a very important thing.

He had listened to God.

He had listened to God.

God had said in chapter 3, verse 15, that from this woman there would be offspring.

Now there were no offspring yet.

No offspring yet.

But God had said there will be an offspring from this woman, a particular offspring, which we know and we saw when we looked at that a few weeks back, pointed ultimately to the seed of woman, who was Christ, who would strike a mortal blow on the head of the seed of the serpent.

And that is a very preliminary first glimmer of the gospel.

We wouldn't think it just reading chapter 3, verse 15 by itself, but with all of the rest that Scripture reveals, that was a first whisper of the fact that Satan would be destroyed and the seed of the woman, ultimately Christ, would be the victor.

God is not finished with the human race yet.

And this woman will have offspring.

And Adam did what we all ought to do.

He took God at his word.

God said there will be offspring, that from her she will be the source of all humanity that then will flow forth.

Now, Hebrews 11, chapter 1, tells us what the nature of faith is.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.

There was no basis for Adam to believe that from his wife would spring all of humanity.

No basis for it, other than the fact that God said it, and she wasn't even pregnant yet.

But what Adam does, and again, you might not catch this just by an initial reading, but as you put this in its broader context, he takes God at his word and he acts accordingly.

Hebrews chapter 11, the great chapter of the heroes of the faith.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

This is the way it, here's the definition of faith.

You don't see it, you have no proof of it, except that God has said it, you take that as true, and you step out.

That's how Abraham walked by faith.

That's how all of the examples, the heroes of the faith, were.

This is North Dakota.

See, that's the way we use the word hope.

But hope in a biblical sense is a truth that's absolutely certain because God has said it.

You don't see it yet.

The nature of the walk of faith, we walk by faith and not by sight.

We don't see that which we believe.

We believe it based upon the fact that God has said it.

Eve would be the mother of all the living.

Adam took God at face value.

It's always a good thing to do.

Take his word the way it says, and he acted accordingly.

So Adam responds by faith.

The human race will survive, and Christ will be the victor.

Genesis 3, 15.

We described it a few weeks ago, the first, the first glimmer of good news, the first gospel, the proto-evangelium, the first explanation of the gospel.

Only seen in its fullness with the rest of Revelation.

Well, what we have here with Adam is the first act of faith that we find in the scriptures.

Taking God at his word and acting accordingly, he gave her the name, the source of all living.

I don't think that's reading too much into it.

I think that's taking the rest of Revelation and seeing it was there all along.

We might not have seen it were not for the rest of Revelation.

In other words, God has for Adam and his wife and for the human race a future and a hope.

Then in verse 21, he gives them new garments.

Another brief verse, easy to skip over it.

Please don't.

And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin and clothed them.

Tucked away in this simple statement, there is more to it than meets the eye, I believe.

You'll remember from chapter two that the first thing that happened when Adam and Eve sinned is that they wanted to hide from God and they wanted to hide from each other.

They experienced guilt and shame for the very first time, and well-deserved guilt.

That was good guilt.

Those feelings were in accordance with reality.

They were sinful now.

And so they experienced good guilt.

Guilt that was designed ultimately to cause them to come and seek forgiveness.

But so what they did, they needed a covering.

So they grabbed some fig leaves and they wove together a little loincloth.

I doubt it was a two-piece bikini in the part of Eve.

Just says it was a loincloth, a very small garment.

Okay.

So that was their solution.

That was their solution for their problem.

The fig leaves, their own efforts to protect themselves, to cover themselves up so they were hiding between the trees, they were hiding behind fig leaves.

And that was best human efforts to deal with the state that they were in.

So what God does is different.

And what God does is better.

What God does is always better than what we do.

Our solutions to our problems are never as good as God's solutions to our problems.

So what did they do?

Well, they had made fig leaves, verse 21.

Why does it say that?

Just another one of those meaningless phrases that we come across every once in a while in the Bible.

Far from it.

Now, where did those skins come from?

All we have is what's written here, but I don't have the impression that God looked around and he said, Can I find some roadkill?

And we'll skin that smelly thing and we'll make a better loincloth.

No.

See, God's way of dealing with it was to take an animal and sacrifice it, kill it.

An innocent animal was killed, was sacrificed so that they might have a covering for their guilt and their shame.

The first hint, see, Genesis, the book of beginnings, the first hint of the way God is going to deal with sin.

And we find that throughout the rest of the Old Testament with the whole sacrificial system.

And it says clearly in the New Testament without shedding Of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin.

The way sins will be covered is not by sewing together fig leaves, not human efforts to deal with it, but God dealing with it, and God's way of dealing with it requires the death of another.

This ultimately points, I believe, to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

You wouldn't know it just from this little phrase, but you put it through in the context of the rest of the Old Testament, the sacrificial system.

You come and you put it in the context of, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

It's a very first glimmer, a first glimmer of what God is going to do to deal with our sins.

I don't know what kind of an animal it was.

The Bible doesn't tell us.

And one of the little questions, and probably will be so preoccupied with the goodness and the majesty of God that I could care less about getting answers to my silly little questions.

But God, what kind of an animal did you sacrifice there in Genesis chapter 3, verse 21?

Genesis 3:21

It would not surprise me a bit.

It's pure speculation, informed perhaps by the rest of the New Testament.

It's probably a lamb.

Why wouldn't it have been?

Pointing towards God's solution to sin.

And all of our efforts are fig leaves.

Just fig leaves.

One writer that I read had an interesting way of putting it.

He said, you know, all of our religious efforts, they're just fig leaves.

So I go to church.

Fig leaves.

I used to be a drunkard and now I'm not.

Well, great, but those are just fig leaves.

You think I'm bad now?

You should have seen what I was.

Fig leaves.

I give money to the poor.

Fig leaves.

I put money in the offering.

Fig leaves.

Those are all good things to do.

But if those are our efforts to deal with our sin, they're as foolish and impotent as fig leaves.

God has his way of dealing with our sin.

So Genesis 3.15, the first glimmer of good news.

Genesis 3.20, the first response of faith on Adam's part.

And 3.21, the first hint of God's way of dealing with sin.

I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord, plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

And I'm going to do it in a way that you would have no idea of.

Infinitely better than beyond everything you can ask or think.

Well, let's look at the okay, one thing.

A tunic is what God made.

The word there in the Hebrew is not this little loincloth.

It's a full body covering.

Isn't that interesting?

The tunics would go down to the knees, if not the ankles.

You see, we might try to cover up part of our need.

There's a full covering clothed with the righteousness of Christ.

Beautiful little picture there.

Am I dreaming that?

I don't think so.

I think this is all pointing forward to truth that would be revealed more richly and more fully.

Now, the perhaps the most interesting of all three of these sections is verses 22 to 24.

Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us.

God is speaking to himself here.

We'll come back to that.

In knowing good and evil.

Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

And the sentence stops there.

An incomplete sentence.

A sentence filled with great emotion.

The unthinkable that man in his sinful state would live forever in his sinful state, confirmed in his sin.

No, that's not the plans that I have for you.

So therefore the Lord God sent them out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man at the east of the Garden of Eden.

He placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

Now, what I want you to walk away with is the thought and see if you can find it in Scripture here and the rest of Scripture.

I want to suggest that this, far from a punishment, well, it was a punishment, but with a purpose.

He graciously, temporarily withheld from them access to the tree of life.

A gracious, kind act of God.

So what we have is here is a discussion within the Godhead.

That sounds kind of strange.

If I talk to myself, Jane thinks that I'm a lot of truth to that, too.

You too, by the way.

A couple of times in Scripture we find God talking to himself.

We saw it back when he created Adam and Eve.

He starts talking to himself.

Well, now, God, it's as though there's so little that we really understand of God, and a lot that we know about and we don't understand.

But God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one person, one being, unity and plurality all put together.

The doctrine of the Trinity makes absolutely no sense.

It just happens, I believe, to be revealed in Scripture.

And this is an early glimmer when we see God talking.

And maybe the conversation went something like this.

Okay.

God didn't scrunch up his forehead.

But I can just imagine in my impoverished way of putting it into words.

Okay.

They, Adam and Eve, they've known what good is.

I created this perfect world, I created this perfect environment, and I have given them every good thing, and it is good.

It is very good.

They have known what good is.

I am and I provide all they need.

Good I am and good I do, as it would later be expressed.

Now, as a result of their stubborn, arrogant, rebellious, sinful way, they now not only know the goodness that I have created, they now know experientially evil.

And they're experiencing it in their being.

They're running and they're hiding.

Now, lest they also, and then it's this sentence is not finished in the text.

It's a sentence with great emotion.

If you're reading the NIV, you'll read a finished sentence.

That's not the way it appears in the best translations.

NIV is a good translation.

None of them get it right all the time.

They don't all agree with me all of the time.

Now, the ESV, the New American Standard, this is an incomplete thought.

Behold, man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, now, lest he reach out and his hand and also take of the tree of life and live forever.

It's a very emotional, dramatic statement that he doesn't complete.

It's as though the very thought of Adam and Eve and the offspring of Eve and Adam living forever in a state of sin.

That's what would have happened if they had taken and eaten of the tree of life.

Then they would be, as it were, like the fallen angels for whom no redemption is possible.

We talked about that a few weeks back.

As we read scripture, there's no indication that there's any hope for forgiveness of sin of fallen angels.

But God has a different plan for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve.

And what a gracious, kind act of God to force them away, put cherubim aflame.

They couldn't get back to that tree of life in their sinful state if they wanted to.

Unthinkable.

Man eternally condemned in his current sinful state.

No, not that.

That's not my purpose for mankind.

I know the plans that I have for you, plans for hope and not for evil, plans for good to give you a future and a hope.

To be destined to live forever in that sinful condition would not be heaven but would be hell.

That is the definition of hell.

And God from eternity past has had an intention, a counsel of his will, a firm intention to provide an opportunity for salvation, for forgiveness of sin, if we will only respond to it.

If Adam and Eve had been able to get to the tree of life, they would have been without hope.

They would have gotten what they deserved.

But my friends, the good news is God has a way so that what we deserve, we don't get.

It has to do with experiencing full separation from God, hell.

See, we don't get what we deserve.

You don't want what you deserve.

And God has another way for us.

Expulsion from Eden is a demonstration of God's glorious and amazing grace.

Just want you to take that thought and think about it, come back to this passage, read it in the context of the rest of Scripture.

And I think you'll find that there is this incredible message.

There is a future for planet Earth.

There is a future for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve.

And that future, that future.

Genesis to Revelation.

The unfolding drama of redemption takes place between these first three chapters and the last two chapters of the Bible.

And God's intention to bless and not to curse, to give a future and a hope, involved Adam and Eve being driven so that they could not return to that lost paradise.

They would wander for centuries east of Eden and very far from home, a phrase you're probably getting tired of hearing me say.

And that path would ultimately wander through the city of Jerusalem.

Outside the city of Jerusalem, on a hill far away stands an old rugged cross, three crosses, in fact.

And on one of those crosses, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And then as we look into Revelation, make note of those.

We're not going to take time to read them, I'd love to.

Do you know what reappears in Revelation 21 and 22?

The tree of life.

The very same tree that had appeared in Genesis reappears.

And although God had made Eden to be a paradise, we have no idea what it would have become, what it would have been like had Adam and Eve not sinned.

We know that Adam was charged with a responsibility to nurture and care for, but that didn't happen.

But what we find in Revelation 21 and 22 is we find that heaven comes down to earth and God takes up his residence with us.

He will be with us.

Heaven and earth become one.

This is my father's world.

Wonderful phrase in that grand old hymn.

Till heaven and earth become one.

And paradise which is lost is recovered, but infinitely better.

And that tree of life is not a scrawny little thing.

It's a big, huge tree.

It exists on both sides of the waters of life.

The waters of life.

And the scriptures end, all but the last word.

Come.

It's an invitation.

Come.

Let the one who is thirsty, let the one who's thirsty come.

Let the one who desires, let him take the water of life without price.

You see, the plan from the beginning has been that we might be demonstrations of his grace, trophies of grace, not getting what we deserve, but getting precisely what we don't deserve.

And it blesses us, but more significantly, it glorifies him.

We exist for the glory of God.

Our salvation, we get tremendous benefit, never to be underestimated.

But there's a greater purpose than just your salvation, and that's that God would be demonstrated to be who He is, far superior than anything else in the world.

More to be desired than fine gold, that which truly satisfies that for which we have been created.

And as we come through that path, through the city, to that hill, to that cross, and receive personally the benefits of what Christ has done, then the story gets completed.

Gets completed cosmically, gets completed in our lives.

It is ours for the asking.

I cannot not say have you asked.

There's an invitation here, my friends.

It's not an invitation to walk to the front.

It's an invitation to take of the water of life.

It's an invitation to eat of the fruit of the tree of life.

It's an invitation to experience forgiveness, reconciliation, transformation.

And it's always been God's intent.

And my question is, will you come?

I'm going to pray a simple prayer.

And if you know that you need to do some kind of business with God today, then I sure invite you to do so and follow along as I pray, and then we'll stand for the benediction.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are thirsty.

We're needy.

We need life.

Heavenly Father, you've invited us to come.

You've invited us to be satiated with who you are.

You've invited us to experience forgiveness.

Many of us have.

We still need to appropriate that.

Father, if there is anyone here this morning who knows that they need to respond to God, Father, I pray you would just help them think about and perhaps pray this simple prayer silently as I pray.

Oh God, I need you.

I am a sinner.

My sin stands before you and me.

You have offered forgiveness through the death of the Lamb of Christ crucified on the cross for me.

Father, I take that by faith.

I don't see it completely, but I accept what you say, and I trust you.

I trust you today.

Oh Father, may this be a day in which your good purposes for each of us are fully and gloriously fulfilled.

Father, we trust you, and we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let me ask you to stand, please, for the benediction.

Now, my friends, my friends, go in the world in peace.

Go into the world in peace.

Have courage.

Hold on to that which is good and honor all men.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the suffering.

Restore the wandering.

Comfort the grieving.

And share the gospel.

And may the grace and the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all.

God bless.

And amen.

You're dismissed.