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Trust In God’s Care As You Face The Consequences – Part 1
Gen. 3:14-20
The perfection of God’s glorious creation is destroyed, and because of that we might tend to see Adam’s fall as a pretty sad ending for the creation story! Humanity, created in God’s very image, is fallen, death and decay now infect all of life, and not just in man. And at the end of Genesis 3, Adam and Eve are kicked out of paradise and sent out into a hostile, sin-cursed world!
But Genesis 3 isn’t just a sad ending to a beautiful beginning, it is also the glorious beginning of the Redemptive saga that fills all of the rest of Scripture! It contains the first promise of a Deliverer, and the whole rest of the Bible is devoted to telling the story of how God, by that deliverer, ultimately redeems fallen humanity and the rest of creation from the cursed state into which Adam’s sin had brought us all into. The chronicle of Redemption now becomes the true closing chapter of the creation account - giving it an even more glorious finale than any merely human mind could ever have come up with.
In fact, the story of God’s new creation is more glorious than all of the combined glories of the original creation! It is a triumphant story of Divine Grace - God’s free and unmerited mercy and kindness to sinners who deserve nothing but condemnation and punishment!
God has absolutely no obligation to redeem Adam or any of his offspring. It is interesting to note that when Satan led the rebellion of angels, those who sinned were all cast out of heaven and immediately condemned to eternal punishment. No provision was made for their redemption. No appeal for repentance was ever offered to them! No redeemer was sent to save them. They were instantly and irreversibly sentenced to hell. God could have just as easily done that with man and no one could have faulted Him for doing so! In fact, justice calls for the punishment of sinners, not for their redemption!
But praise God that His word teaches that God is “ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abundant in kindness” in Neh. 9:17. And in His Grace, He had planned before the foundation of the world to redeem a vast amount of humanity from their own sin: (Eph. 1:4-5 - “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”)
And in 2 Tim. 1:9-10 - “He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
The outworking of that plan begins here in Genesis 3, when God confronted Adam for the first time after he sinned. From the very moment Adam and Eve sinned they were aware that something was seriously wrong. They were feeling guilt and shame which is why they tried to hide their nakedness. But worse, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord among the trees of the garden.”
Now they feared the very thing they had previously delighted in the most: The presence of the Lord!!!! Sinners always despise His presence, because they know they cannot stand in the face of such holiness. So here in the verses we are covering in the next few weeks, Adam and Eve were disgraced and shamed and their lives were made difficult. But more than that, they were condemned to die, just as God had forewarned them. And yet, even in the midst of all this, we see clear evidence of divine grace towards Adam and Eve. The very words of the curse actually gave the fallen couple much reason for hope.
This was but an introduction. Join us next week when we begin covering the text of Genesis 3:14-20.
Last Update: Jan 27, 2019 8:18 am CST
