The Healing Word

Pastor Jack Morris: You're going to work and labor and sweat all your life to get those promotions and to get a nest egg and to buy the house and whatever, and then you're going to leave it all and go right back to the dirt from which you came. Wow.

Guest (Male): Even in the middle of humanity's failure, God's mercy still shines through. Today on the Healing Word, Pastor Jack Morris presents "Judgement and Hope." We'll examine the consequences of sin in the Garden of Eden, but also the powerful promise of redemption through Jesus Christ.

Pastor Jack Morris: Today's message is entitled "Judgement and Hope." We're going to look at what happened to our first parents, the sin they committed, the judgement and punishment that God brings upon those who are disobedient.

But the most wonderful thing about this message, and I pray that it'll be so for you, that we're going to look at God's majestic mercy. That God does not end with punishment and judgement. God is a compassionate Father, and His story always ends in mercy and in grace.

Our first parents sinned. Eve took the forbidden fruit, ate it, gave it to her husband, and he ate it. They listened to the serpent. They sinned. They went against God's clear commandment. It was so clearly given. No one could have misunderstood. Certainly, Adam couldn't have misunderstood what God wanted. God made it very, very plain.

And by their own free will, they went against what God clearly commanded them not to do, and they did it. And they sinned. They broke with God. When they did that, they exchanged pleasure and peace for pain. They exchanged abundance of blessing for meagerness and toil.

They exchanged wonderful fellowship with God and harmony with God and with each other. Now they have alienation and toil. They gave it up. They chose to walk out on God. And when they did, they lost all that was beautiful and received all that was ugly. Never forget, friends, you have a choice, and you and you alone are responsible for your own happiness, your own joy.

Let's look at the scripture. May the Holy Spirit guide us today and open our eyes and help us to look and see because we can trust God and turn things around in our life. We can do it, and it can happen this morning. Look at verse eight. Genesis chapter three, verse eight. "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."

God came calling. God took the initiative. God could have just as easily have said, "I made you a garden of beauty and peace and pleasure, but you didn't want it. You wanted your way. You wanted your thing. You wanted to do it how you wanted to do it. Go to it and live in your sin and your shame and your guilt. Die in your shame and in your guilt."

God could have done that. But thank God He didn't do that. He came calling. Now they would have never known where to have found God. Where could they have found God? Look at verse nine. "But the Lord God called to the man and said, 'Where are you?'"

A rhetorical question. God knew exactly where man was. Man was now in shame, in guilt, in fear, and he was hiding. He was hiding. And so God came calling. God knew where man was, but man didn't know where God was. Where could Adam have gone to have found God and to have brought God back into the garden if God hadn't taken the initiative and chosen to come back into the garden?

And this is what man said in verse 10: "I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked and so I hid myself." I hid. You see, friends, this is the way it is with God. God seeks man; man never seeks God. Let me say that again. Are you listening? God seeks man. He seeks you. You and I never seek God. It plainly says this in Romans chapter three, that man does not seek God.

You may say, "Well, I'm here today, I'm a seeker." No, you're not a seeker. God chose to come back into your life. God chose to come after you after you kicked Him out and said, "I want to live life my way." God comes back because you didn't know where to find Him.

The Apostle Paul said in Romans chapter seven, "Oh, wretched man that I am. Who shall deliver me from this body of death?" We were born and shapen in iniquity, the Psalmist says. And the Apostle Paul was saying in so many words that death hung on him like a corpse.

He said, "I've got a dead monkey on my back and I can't get this off of me. I have the smell of death and I can't get this corpse off my back. I'm walking around carrying a dead man and I'm the dead man." And then he says, "Oh, wretched man that I am. Who's going to deliver me?" Notice, who. I can't do it. Animals can't do it. There's a "who" out there somewhere. Who's going to deliver me? If only I could find God.

And then he concludes Romans chapter seven, verse 23, by saying this: "Thanks be unto God through the Lord Jesus Christ." Who shall deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be unto God, the Lord Jesus Christ shall deliver me from this body of death. Never think that you can find God by searching. You can't. If you're a Christian today, you need to put your head down in humbleness and say, "Thank God He found me."

I heard a sermon by a great preacher, Dr. Barnhouse, who tells the story of an oriental that came to this country many years ago. And people were surprised because he went to a Christian church when he came to America. And somebody in the church walked up to him. Orientals very often are Hindu or Buddhist, but he immediately goes to a Christian church and somebody said to him, "When did you find God?" And the oriental said this: "Me no find God. God find me."

That's it. You see, we run from God. Just like Adam, we hide. We're in the garden, we're afraid, we're covered with guilt, we're hiding. But God is looking for us. Why is He looking for us? To give us mercy, to give us grace, to forgive us, to restore us. And we're running and we're hiding.

We hide in our careers, we hide in our jobs, we hide in alcohol, we hide in pleasure, we hide in things, a new house, we hide in new spouses. We're running, we're hiding, we're covering up. We're trying to blot it out, trying to blot God out. And we run and we run. "I got away from Him. I got away from Him. I don't feel guilty anymore."

Only to find face-to-face with God. And we look at God and we say, "Where did you come from? How did you find me?" And then we take off and we run again. We're all out of breath. "I got away from Him. I got away from Him." And all of a sudden, there He is again. God says, "I know the shortcuts. I know all the shortcuts. I've come to help you and to have mercy upon you."

Look at the scripture. This is how man is. This is how Adam was, and every man since and every woman since has been in this place hiding from God. Look at verse 11: "And God said, 'Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you?'" I commanded you. You went against me. You went against God? I commanded you and you did it anyway. Can you believe such a thing?

We do it all the time. Verse 12: "The man said, 'The woman.'" Oh, come on. "The woman." God says, "I commanded you?" "The woman!" He turns to the woman: "The serpent!" Blame. No one wanting to share or take responsibility. In the army, they call that passing the buck. "I can't go to church, my husband won't go with me or my wife won't go with me. My children want me to go to another church."

Hey, quit alibiing. You're your own person. Stop passing the buck. "I had to go away this weekend." It's a convenient excuse. You can blame somebody else for it. Blame. We always want to blame somebody. But you're going to stand before God, sir. Lady, you're going to stand before God, and you will stand before God and God will look at you and say, "Why didn't you obey me?"

You're not going to be able to say my husband or my wife or my children or my job. I mean, we alibi our way, bluff our way. We're not fooling anybody but ourselves. We really aren't. But look at the story here. "The man, the woman you put here with me. You gave me the wrong wife. You should have given me a religious wife."

It reminds me of a story. This young fellow got married and he was only married about three months and he came back to the pastor and made an appointment. Maybe he was married three or four months, just a short time, and he went in and he told the pastor, "Oh, this woman that I married."

And so he begins to tell the pastor all about her, all her faults, all her mistakes, how miserable she's making him. And the pastor squirmed and twisted and wondered, "What am I going to say to this young man?" And finally, the man gave the pastor an opportunity to speak and the pastor said, "Now, you took this woman in that ceremony. Remember, you took her for better or for worse."

The man spoke up and said, "Yes, but she's worse than I took her for." And this is what Adam was saying: "I took her, but you're the one that gave her to me." The man said, "The woman, she gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate." Verse 13: "Then the Lord God said to the woman, 'What is this you have done?' The woman said, 'The serpent deceived me and I ate.'"

You see, all God was wanting in this interrogation, all God was wanting was a confession. He wasn't wanting them to pass the buck and to blame one another. God was just saying, "Come on, be honest and confess." For with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. First John 1:9. And with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.

Friend, to get the peace back and to get rid of the shame and the guilt, you're going to have to confess it. You're going to have to confess it and turn away from it because a great salvation comes when you confess. But if you blame it on your spouse and you blame it on your church and you blame it on your children and you blame it on your culture, you can blame all you want to blame. You need to say, "God, I went against your commandment. Have mercy and forgive me." That's all God wanted. That's all God wanted. But instead, they blamed and blamed.

So let's look at what happened. In verses 14 and 15, God's talking to the serpent. In verse 16, God talks to the woman, and then in verses 17 through 19, He talks to the man. Let's see what God says. Listen to what God says to the serpent: "So the Lord God said to the serpent, the shining one."

He wasn't a snake. God wasn't talking to a snake, He was talking to a serpent. Now I know the words are synonymous now, but they weren't then. The shining one, the upright one, the one that had human ability to commune with humans, the most intelligent of all the animals. Eve wasn't at all surprised when the serpent came and talked to her.

So God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all the wild animals. You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life." There are pictures today and artist's conceptions, and you've no doubt seen them, of a tree with a snake curled around the branch and a beautiful woman with very long hair. You've seen those pictures. It's entertaining, but that's certainly not the way it was.

That's not the way it was. The shining one standing there with the couple, face-to-face with God. Adam and Eve standing there, their hearts palpitating, not knowing what God was going to do. Was God going to annihilate us, wipe us off the face of the earth?

But when God spoke to that serpent and said, "Cursed are you," right before their eyes, they saw that upright one come right down into the dust, the lowest, the most humiliated of all animals. And right before their eyes, that thing became a loathsome, slithering snake. They backed away from it. Even to this day, you can look at a snake and you can see part of the leftovers of before the curse—the shininess of its skin, the shininess of its eyes. There's a little bit left over.

Look at verse 15. God's talking to the snake. God says, "And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers." There's the first promise of the virgin birth. The woman's offspring. Notice it didn't say the man and woman's offspring, but the woman's offspring.

She's going to give birth someday to a Messiah, to a Christ, that's going to come. And look what's going to happen. "He will crush your head, snake, and you will strike his heel." And at Calvary, that's exactly what happened. At Calvary, Satan crippled Jesus, but He didn't destroy Him. But at Calvary, Christ stomped the serpent's head and rendered him powerless to destroy us in hell.

Friend, you can break any habit. You can change any sadness. You have power today to look to Christ and experience a great and wonderful salvation. Jesus Christ did not have Adam's nature. He was not part of Adam's nature in that He could or He could have sinned, He could have yielded to temptation, but He did not have in His genes the taint of sin.

But He took your sin that you and I have, and He carried them and nailed them all to the cross and rendered our sin helpless. Here's God making a great promise. Now look at what God says to the woman in verse 16: "To the woman he said, 'I will greatly increase your pains in childbirth and with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be to your husband and he will rule over you.'"

Childbirth. A woman has a unique relationship with God that no man has. She cooperates with God in bringing new life into the world. And God says in that area where you are so much like me as a life-giver, you're going to suffer in that area. Never since then women have had to go through the very valley of the shadow of death.

But notice he says, "Your desire will be to your husband and he will rule over you." From now on when temptation comes, you better desire his advice and not run off and try to do things on your own. This is a cooperative, a one-flesh relationship, and don't ever forget it, lady or man. Don't ever forget that.

And then he says, "Your husband, your man, will rule over you." Now I want you to notice something very careful. He had already cursed the snake. This ruling, this hierarchy, comes as a result and after sin. In the garden, there was equality, and wherever there is a hierarchy, one putting another down, you can mark it down, it comes right from the snake. It comes right from sin. It's part of sin.

He will rule over you. What is happening today with Christ and the church? Now the church is the bride of Christ. Christ loves the church, His bride, and He is lifting His bride to a new station. He can't do it for those who are not part of His church, part of His bride. But for those who are part of His bride, He is lifting them to a place of blessing where they will become an heir and a joint-heir, equal with Him.

See, that's redemption. Equality, lifting up, one flesh. Can I say one part of me is inferior to another part of me? I'm just one person. And this is what God is doing through Christ and He's lifting the church. And what Christ is doing for His bride, mister, you do it for your bride. Stop treating her like the unredeemed.

Stop treating her and putting her in that category after the curse of the snake. Take her back to Eden. Lift her, bless her, love her, lift her. Christ is making His bride a king and a priest, an heir and a joint-heir. This is the ministry of redemption.

If anybody ought to be saved and come to Christ, it ought to be women. There ought to be many more women converts than there are men converts. Women, you've got something really to gain from this. You've got equality with your husband, a bringing back, a process that He's bringing you to. And you need to yield and submit to Him so that He can do that and bring you to that place that God wants you to be in.

Now look at what He says to Adam in verse 17. Are you following along? "To Adam he said, 'Because you listened to your wife and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; and through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your brow. You will eat your food until you return from the ground, since you were taken for dust you are and to dust you'll return.'"

You're going to work and labor and sweat all your life to get those promotions and to get a nest egg and to buy the house and whatever. And then you're going to leave it all and go right back to the dirt from which you came. Wow, what a prospect that is. You see, sin pays off in ugly ways.

But here's the blessing. Verse 21 says: "The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them." God clothed them. You see, they tried to clothe themselves. You see, God has a covering, and if you reject God's covering, you're lost. Your only hiding place is Jesus Christ. If you don't know Him, you are lost, lost, lost.

Guest (Male): God's story never ends with judgement alone. Even after humanity's fall, the Lord promised redemption through Jesus Christ, the one who crushes the power of sin and restores hope. At the Healing Word website, you can discover additional messages from Pastor Morris and sign up for weekly devotionals delivered directly to your inbox. And if this ministry has been a blessing to your life, your financial partnership helps us continue bringing biblical encouragement and hope to others. Thank you for joining us today. Next time, Pastor Morris concludes this series with "The Tree of Life," a message about God's invitation to choose life through Jesus Christ.