The Loss of Paradise: Sin and Sacrifice
1 Chronicles 15:1–16; Genesis 2–3
Samuel Lesson #142
August 14, 2018
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, it’s just a wonderful privilege that we have that we can come together, that we can talk about You, that we can think about You, that You can reveal Yourself to us through Your Word, and as we learn about who You are and what You’ve done, may You help us to expand and deepen our understanding. Father, we often come before You, and we are in such a hurry in this life now that we don’t really take the time to think, to pause, to reflect.
“Father, we pray that You would impress upon us our sinful, depraved condition and the extent of Your magnificent grace in providing a perfect salvation, sufficiency in all things, sufficient grace, sufficient for salvation, and that there’s no problem, no difficulty, there’s no circumstance in our life that has not been understood by You from eternity past. You’ve made complete, total perfect, sufficient provision, so that we can learn to walk in dependence upon You. We pray that You will challenge us with these things. In Christ’s name, amen.”
Slide 2
Open your Bibles with me to Genesis 3, and we’re moving forward in our study of worship. Tonight, we’re looking at the loss of paradise, and that involves two things: sin and sacrifice. These are important for understanding what is essential in worship from the time of the Fall.
Slide 3
We’ve been looking at this topic of what the Bible teaches about worship ever since we got into a study of 2 Samuel 6, the movement of the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, and this expansion of corporate worship that took place and is described in 1 Chronicles 14, 15, and 16. One of the things we learned here, is there are advances that occur, innovations as it were, that occur in worship that as far as we know are not the result of special revelation either to David and Solomon, or later to Josiah, because there’s a great expansion under the reign of Josiah in the late 600s BC. This tells us there can be innovations and expansion and development in worship within a biblical framework, but we have to understand there are certain biblical absolutes that establish parameters for biblical worship. We should always be pushing ourselves in that direction where we think more deeply and more significantly.
This is often a result of a church culture that in our world has become very shallow and superficial today. Consequently, we produce shallow and superficial music. But because we’re shallow and superficial people, and we don’t spend much time in the Word, we don’t like being called shallow and superficial because we think we’re being pretty deep and profound. The reality is, it just shows how narrow our frame of reference is.
I think I pointed this out before. Prior to World War II, if you were Anglican, you would not even be considered for ordination unless you’d already memorized the entire Psalter—all 150 psalms. We think of that as, “Wow, that is extreme!” But see, it is that kind of expectation of pastoral teaching and leadership that has characterized much of the history of Christianity, and it shows us how we have lowered our standards.
We fall far short of where things were 150 years ago, but it was an understanding that the men who were leaders in worship, and that’s not in the sense of the song leader today, I think it’s an aberration to refer to the person who leads music as the worship leader because the pastor is the worship leader. He is the one who orchestrates all aspects of the morning service. He’s the one who usually will give the opening prayer, the invocation and overall, he will direct the direction of the service, or oversee the direction of the service, so that it blends together.
The ultimate form of worship is understanding the proclamation of the truth of God’s Word. These are aspects that we’ll be studying as we continue our study of worship.
As we’ve fallen from this, we need to recognize that this affects us personally in terms of our personal worship. We’ve all been affected, myself included, and when I look at a whole generation of pastors that have come along that are roughly my age, they were held to lower standards. I’ve seen some who’ve come behind that were held to even lower standards. It’s really sad that sheep will let their shepherds be so poorly educated, poorly trained, and expect so little of them in terms of their time in the Word, their time in prayer, and understanding their biblical job description. So, if you have low standards for yourself, it’s easy to develop low standards for a pastor.
One of the things that we’ve looked at in Genesis 1 is that man is created in the image of God, male and female equally, which means they are to represent God, and that is connected to their function as seen in Genesis 1:26–28. Their function is to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field.
As they do that, they are representing God as the ultimate owner of the earth, and the One to whom they are ultimately answerable. So, it’s not an autonomous rule, it’s not a dictatorial, tyrannical rule that comes only as a result of sin, but it is a role of ruling as a servant.
We’ve seen this further developed when we get into Genesis 2:15, that man was placed in the Garden to serve and to keep—two words that are frequently used to define the role of priests. So, we see this imagery at the very beginning that tells us that man is a priest-king.
If man is created as a priest-king, that means one of our foundational purposes in life is to worship God. To serve Him is to worship Him, and that man was created to be a worshiper, and that all of life would be designed under this rubric of worshiping God, serving Him, and obeying Him.
As they do that, we recognize this was based on the idea of having a fellowship with God. This was a very active thing—think about what’s going on in the Garden. Every day, God came and spent time with Adam and Eve. He talked with them, there’s communication, there’s an enjoyment of that relationship. That’s why many times I start class and say, “Well, I hope you’ve been enjoying your relationship with God.” Fellowship is a very active concept.
Often, I’ve found that people think of fellowship as being “in fellowship.” That’s a very passive term—I’m just in fellowship; I’m just sitting here like a big, spiritual lump waiting for the Holy Spirit to slap me upside the head to do something. That is a subtle form of mysticism actually.
Fellowship is something that is active. That’s why I prefer using the term, “walking by the Spirit.” We are commanded to walk by the Spirit. This is a very active idea, and this is what we see throughout Scripture. We are to be enjoying that fellowship with God.
Slide 4
Since the Fall, that’s abrogated, but we recover it when we’re saved because of our position in Christ, and it’s an ongoing fellowship with a sovereign and holy, triune God. We celebrate this, we focus on it by means of adoration, which incorporates words such as praise, reflecting on things for which we are grateful, how God has interceded in our life and provided things for us.
I find that young believers, young Christians will talk in certain, superficial jargon, and you have noticed, perhaps went through this in your own life, you went through this stage. You see this with a lot of younger people in certain contexts. They talk like this a lot, and they season their language with things like “praise the Lord;” “I’m so thankful to God” and they overuse the word “blessing” again and again and again, thinking that by using that kind of language that somehow shows they are more spiritual. What I’ve discovered is people like that generally have a different …Hhow do you relate to people at the work place? How do you relate to your neighbors if you think that you have to talk in this kind of Christian jargon in order to be spiritual? It creates a superficiality in and of itself.
But we praise God by talking in everyday normal language like we talk to people and friends about how God has provided for us, what He has done for us, how He has answered prayer. As part of that, it reinforces our trust, and so we often will include within those comments a commitment of trust, and our need to be more consistently obedient to what has been revealed in Scripture.
Then worship also involves remembering what God has done in saving us at the Cross, and providing an ongoing spiritual growth and the means for spiritual growth. All of this is based on the fact that we’re living today in light of eternity; we’re moving forward.
Slide 5
So, we looked at this and saw that there’s imagery related to the initial sanctuary on the earth, the Garden of Eden, where God dwelt and was in their presence, and that brings an important word into our worship vocabulary. That’s the word “sanctuary.” We’ve all heard comments over the years that we meet in the auditorium. This isn’t the sanctuary.
The sanctuary is the individual believer. There’s a lot more truth to that than not, but there’s also this sense that when we’re gathered together as believers to worship, there’s a true biblical fellowship there because our focus is on Christ. Because we all have the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit in us, this is something that is an aggregate in corporate worship that makes it a “set apart place.” That’s what sanctuary means.
All of this goes back to the fact that we have a really hard time understanding the biblical concept of holiness. Holiness is not being morally pure or being perfect; it is being set apart to the service of God. So, when we come together as “sanctified ones” in a congregation, we are coming together because we have set apart that time in our lives on Sunday mornings to worship the Lord. We are coming together to show that as a group of believers, we are set apart to the service of God, so that in a real sense, it is a time for realizing that this is a sanctuary—a place we’ve set apart for the service of God, the worship of God, the study of God’s Word. We see that this gets distorted and destroyed because of sin. Man is kicked out of that initial sanctuary, so the memory of that initial sanctuary is reflected in the tabernacle and the temple, and the articles of furniture in the temple and tabernacle reflect the memory of that paradise and also look forward to the restoration of the earth as a sanctuary of God, and the paradise of God in the new heavens and the new earth.
Slide 6
We’ve also seen that man is kicked out of the Garden, and that that is depicted in the furniture of the tabernacle, especially the veils that depict the cherubs, which remind them that God sent an army of cherubs around the Garden of Eden to prevent man from reentering.
Slide 7
Last time, we looked at the significance of the trees in the Garden—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And those are represented by the golden lampstand, which reflects the tree of life, and the broken tablets, which represent the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents who gets to determine what is right or wrong. God is determining that Himself through His revelation, but man rejected that and was going to grab for it all on his own.
The cherubim I just mentioned, the image of God—it’s interesting; you go through a study of the history of religions and as far back as you go, there’s the idea of sacrifice; there’s the idea of the image of the god in the temple; there’s this idea of some sort of reason to placate the god because of human failure. Where did these ideas come from? They’re expressed in some different ways in some different religions, but they all reflect a common origin which is stated as the truth that we have in the Scriptures.
In the tabernacle or temple, we have man. That’s why we’re not supposed to make any graven images of God because the image of God is mankind, the human being who is serving as a priest. This becomes developed in a distinctive way in the Church Age because every believer is a priest to God, and he is a sanctuary for the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit.; in fact, for all members of the Trinity.
Slide 8
What I want to do today is to start to move forward a little bit in terms of understanding what destroyed the initial environment of worship in the Garden. What is the original normative circumstance of God’s perfect creation?
God created a test for man, one test, and that had to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2:9 states that God put the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden, in the sanctuary. So there’s the source of life, which comes from God, and the source of death.
Slide 9
They are warned in Genesis 2:16–17, especially verse 17, that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—notice the verbiage here—“in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.” A couple of things to point out here. First, we see the abundance of God here; some of it comes across in the English; some of it comes across a little more in the Hebrew. But, the first statement God makes about this in Genesis 2:16 is “Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat.” That is a profound statement. God’s grace abundantly provides for man. There is a rich variety of food available that he will never tire of and that will provide for all of his physical needs and for nourishment.
Then, there’s a warning about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Genesis 2:17, “and in the day you eat of it,”—now that’s a pretty precise term, that’s not talking about years later; it’s at that time, in that day, instantly—“in that day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.” That phrase indicates a certainty, an absolute certainty, and the way it’s stated in the Hebrew is interesting because the Hebrew presents this in what’s called a qal, an infinitive construct plus the verb, and it’s an intensification of the meaning of the word that’s used to express something in hyperbole and exaggeration and to emphasize its certainty. So, that’s what God’s saying here.
What’s also interesting is when you look at that parallel at the end of Genesis 2:16 that says, “you may freely eat,” that is the same grammatical construction. It’s an infinitive construct plus the verb, which is saying the same thing. That’s why I’ve often said that somehow, somewhere, in the background of biblical studies in the 19th or 20th century, it would be translated, “dying you will die.” See, we have two types of death.
That’s not biblical Hebrew. That idiom is not correct at all. You wouldn’t translate the first part, “eating you will eat” as if there were two different kinds of eating. It’s the same grammar. That first line, “freely eat,” using that construct is saying, “you will eat in abundance; you will certainly eat; you will enjoy all of it.” It is a hyperbolic way of talking about the joy that you’ll receive from all of the provision that God has given. So there’s a tremendous way in which we understand God’s grace. Then, of course, there’s the warning about the certainty of spiritual death in Genesis 2:17.
What we see here is when we’re talking about the pre-Fall worship, we see that then as well as now the worship of God by Adam and Eve, their service to God increased and grew. They’re learning; they’re learning about God; they’re learning who God is; they’re learning what God has revealed to them. The more they learned, the more robust their worship became, because as they learned and as that learning shaped their minds and shaped their thinking, they realized more and more how much God had provided for them, how much God had given them, and how truly abundant was their life. That would also produce thankfulness and gratitude, which is also very much a part of our worship.
Rabbis had an interesting way of talking about worship and giving back to God. They used the illustration of a little girl who would go out into her mother’s flower garden. Her mother did all the work, she planted the seeds, she weeded, she took care of the garden, and produced this beautiful garden. And the little girl goes out and she picks flowers from her mother’s garden, and then she goes in, makes a nice bouquet and gives it to her mother.
That is a lot like what we are. We are placed on this great earth that God has provided for man, we are taking what God made, and we are doing something with it and then giving it back to Him. It is an act of dependence, an act of gratitude, and it shows our dependence upon God. The more we reflect on that idea, the more we think that is how our gratitude to God should work. Then the more we personally understand and develop the capacity to worship.
The test is whether or not the creature is going to remain dependent on God in every area, specifically, in the area of understanding right and wrong, understanding good and evil. Is the creature going to yield to the temptation to define it for himself, or is the creature going to resist that and listen only to God to instruct and teach about the nature of right and wrong, and good and evil? So, when we move from Genesis 2 to Genesis 3, we’ve gone through these many different times in many different ways, but right now, I’m just focusing on them in terms of what they tell us about worship.
Slide 10
In Genesis 3:1, we’re introduced to the serpent. If this were set to music, if this were an opera, you would begin to hear the kettle drums rumble, and you would hear the base notes playing as the evil villain is slithering onto the scene. We’re told about this serpent in Genesis 3:1, “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.”
What’s interesting is how Genesis tells this story because at this point, you might want to ask the question, “Is that talking about the serpent, or is that talking about the one who is inhabiting the serpent?” You don’t know until you get to Revelation 12 that the serpent is Satan, he’s the dragon who is called the “serpent of old.” So, there is a physical serpent, but that serpent has been taken over by this evil one who is Satan or Lucifer, who is fallen from God. So, is this talking about the serpent itself, or is this talking about the one inhabiting the serpent?
What’s the answer? I don’t know. I think that’s why it’s written this way—to capture our attention and to get us to think about this. The word that’s used there for cunning is the Hebrew word arum and this has the idea of being “crafty” or “shrewd.” It’s also a word that is translated numerous times in Proverbs as being “skilled in decision making.” The word is used positively in many proverbs as a contrast to the foolish man, but when it is used in the negative sense, it is used to refer to someone who is characterized by artful or cunning practices. He’s tricky, he’s going to be deceptive, therefore, he is able to deceive, this, of course is a picture we see of Satan.
Ultimately, I think this is referring to the power behind the serpent. He is able to twist things, able to overwhelm the woman with his logic and his trickery. In order to deceive her, he comes in disguise as something beautiful and attractive, and he is designed to be a subordinate.
The serpent was one of the beasts of the field. He was to be ruled over by the woman. So what we’re going to see here is that the source of temptation is one that comes not from someone who is viewed as evil or wicked, but is viewed as a subordinate and non-threatening. Often, that is what happens in life; we get caught up, we get tempted into something because it doesn’t look like it’s that bad. We get sucked into a deception. We know that behind all evil is Satan.
Slide 11
That doesn’t mean that we can fall back on that old Flip Wilson line, “The devil made me do it.” We are responsible. Eve was held accountable and responsible for what took place in terms of her deception.
In 2 Corinthians 11:14, we’re told that Satan appears as an angel of light. He is able to transform himself, and how in the world are we going to be able to withstand the temptations of Satan? He is wily, he is crafty. We are warned against him in numerous places in Scripture—Ephesians 6:10 and following is one. How could Eve have protected herself?
If I’ve made the statement, and I have, that God provided everything for them, He has provided for them. He’s provided just what she needs in order to avoid this temptation. What has He given her? Revelation, but that revelation was initially given to the man. He is told and given the instruction in Genesis 2:15–16, “Then the Lord God took the man [The woman has not been created yet.] and put him in the garden of Eden [and gave him the instructions] to tend and to keep it.” He is the one who is given the information about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then God created the woman.
It was the man’s responsibility to fully teach her, fully instruct her, and he may not have. He may have left something out; he may not have indicated the significance of everything, but we don’t know. We know that when we get into 1 Timothy 2:8–12, it places responsibility on the woman because she is deceived. That takes place in this time. So, [2 Corinthians 11:14] Satan will disguise or transform himself into an angel of light, and what he offers is something that sounds good, looks good, and seems more than logical, rational, and reasonable to us.
Think about Peter. Peter is with Christ, and Jesus is on the way to the Cross, and Peter says, “Lord, You don’t have to do this; we’ll protect you.” And the Lord says, [Matthew 16:23] “Get behind Me, Satan.” Not that Peter was indwelt by Satan but that he is representing a Satanic idea, he is a source of temptation. He, like Eve, is dealing with Jesus like Eve is dealing with a subordinate. Peter was a subordinate to Jesus; the serpent was a subordinate to Eve. The serpent comes along, and he is going to begin to entice her by distorting or opening the door for her to distort the Word of God. He wants to probe to see if she knows what the prohibition is.
When we get into the New Testament in Matthew 3, when Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness and Satan begins to tempt Him, what’s he doing? He’s quoting Scripture—he’s misapplying Scripture—but he quotes Scripture. This shows that temptation often comes wrapped up in something good, but Jesus refutes him by rejecting Satan’s interpretation of the text, and He refutes it with another text.
This tells us when we look at these two temptation scenarios that if you don’t know the Bible, you are making yourself a victim of temptation. You will succumb to it because you don’t know the Word; you’re not handling it correctly.
Slide 12
The principle we see here is, failure to know the Word leads to a breakdown in worship. Foundational to worship, therefore, is the knowledge of God’s Word. Whatever else we do, we have to know the truth of God’s Word. Jesus says to the woman at the well [John 4], that a time was coming when we would worship by means of the Spirit and by means of truth. And if you don’t know the truth, you can’t worship correctly and biblically, and you’re just making it up as you go along.
Slide 13
Satan approaches her, and he raises the question, [Genesis 3:1] “Has God indeed said …” The way this is structured in the Hebrew is he is raising doubt. He’s wanting her to think about what God has said, and to put herself in a position of judging it. But he also wants to see how much she knows. Genesis 3:1, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ ” He wants to know whether she understands revelation at this point. Does she understand what God has said?
Slide 14
So, we go back and look at Genesis 2:16–17 again, and God said, “ ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely [abundantly] eat.’ ” Notice the difference: [Genesis 3:1] He [Satan] said, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ ” Then in Genesis 2:17, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat ...” He’s being accurate in the way he’s presenting it, in the way he’s quoting it, but he’s not accurate in the way he sets it up with this little nuance of the question that he is asking.
By focusing on a clear-cut statement of God, he is rather disarming. It’s not really up for debate; is this really what God said? Or, maybe we just haven’t understood it correctly. Often, this is a problem that comes up throughout the history of the Old Testament. As you think about what has happened down through the ages, how many times the Word of God was not really understood or was misinterpreted or was misapplied or was taught wrong.
You think about different about situations; think about Moses. When Moses was told the first time that the children of Israel did not have water, he was told to strike the rock, but the second time, he was told to speak to the rock, and he struck it. God said, you’re not going into the Promised Land.
Worship is precise. God’s precise in what He says and what He means; it’s not open for us to say, “Well, you know, I want to do it a little bit this way or a little bit that way.”
Samson found out when he cut his hair, that was it. He lost his power. It’s just an absolute. God is very strict about these things. We think about Saul, and God’s command to Saul [1 Samuel 15] to completely annihilate all of the Amalekites, man, woman, and child. And he leaves some of them alive, and he leaves their cattle alive, and for that, he is going to lose the throne.
You can go through the Scripture again and again, and see that it’s the little things, the details of God’s revelation that when ’those details are misunderstood, you have a big problem.
Think about the Israelites at Kadesh Barnea, God tells them to go into the Land, send in the spies to see the situation, and do a reconnaissance so that they can understand how they’re going to take the Land. But they misinterpret it; they misinterpret what God said as if God said, go see if you can take the Land. Only Caleb and Joshua understood that God had given them the Land, and He wasn’t telling them to go see if they could take it, but just to spy it out and understand what the circumstances were going to be when they got in, so they could trust God. But because they misinterpreted God’s command, it caused that whole generation to be trapped in the wilderness until they died off. They were prohibited from entering into the Promised Land.
It is important to understand precisely what the Word of God says so that we can apply it.
Slide 15
Eve then, in her answer says, [Genesis 3:2] “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden;” Now God didn’t say that; He said, you may freely eat of the trees of the Garden. So, she reduces the significance of what God had said, and she’s saying we may eat of the trees of the Garden, so she’s playing it down a little bit. And then in Genesis 3:3, she says, “but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, “‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, ….’” See, what she’s doing there is she’s adding to it because they could have touched the tree, they could have leaned up against it, they could have had their picnic under the tree, they could’ve walked around it, and nothing was going to happen. God just said, “Don’t eat from the tree.”
Then we have this last phrase in Genesis 3:3 translated in the King James Bible as “lest you die.” This is a really good translation, but “lest” is kind of an archaic English word. The NIV translates it, “or you will die.” That’s not right. That is what God said, but that’s not what Eve said. Eve uses a small word in the Hebrew here, which is the word pen and it has a negative sense to it, and it means, “in order that you not die.” It’s not, “or you will die.”
See, there’s a little wiggle room there that, “maybe we won’t die. It’s possible that we could die, but maybe not.” It is important to get that word translated correctly. She’s not directly quoting God here; she’s putting a “maybe we won’t die.” He just said, “don’t eat of it lest you die [possibly, you might die].” God doesn’t say, “possibly you might die;” He’s saying, “certainly you will die.” And so, she’s already fudging what God has said, indicating that her knowledge or understanding of the Scripture is not what it ought to be. This is the real issue here, that we have to know exactly what God says to do. He is very specific.
In John 8:44, Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You are of your father the devil,”—He was a liar from the beginning. And that’s what he’s doing; he’s using this to lie and that’s what he does in the next verse.
Slide 16
Genesis 3:4, “Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die.’ ” This is interesting in the Hebrew because what God said was, “You will certainly die,” and He uses that construction of an infinitive construct plus the verb. What Satan does is he puts a “no” in front of it to say, “You will not certainly die.” It’s bad grammar because normally the negative is supposed to go in front of the verb, and that would be between the infinitive and the verb. But Satan puts the lo “no” in front of it to emphasize he’s directly quoting God, and he’s directly opposing God at this point.
He’s going to be bold like this because she doesn’t know what the issues are. She is ignorant of the initial prohibition, and so now he can exploit that lack of knowledge, and he says, “you’re not going to die.” Then, he’s going to impugn God’s character. He says, “See, God’s really out for His own here. He doesn’t want any competition. He’s going to limit you; He’s going to keep you from reaching your full potential. He’s going to keep you from all of the happiness and joy that’s holding you up.”
How many times have you heard people say, and you know they’re getting involved in sin whatever it may be, and you talk to them about it and they say, “Well, I don’t think God would want me not to be happy, and I’m going to be happy by doing that”? We’ve heard that from many people; probably most of us in the room have said that at one point or another perhaps. That’s what the rationale is: Oh, God wants me to be happy. Doing x, y, or z, is going to make me happy, so obviously that’s going to be God’s will. That’s starting from a false assumption.
God’s primary objective in your life or in my life is not for us to be happy; it is for us to glorify Him. If I glorify Him, then I will experience true joy and happiness, but that is the result of obtaining the objective; it’s not the objective. That changes everything.
Slide 17
John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning …” Who died? We all died spiritually. “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” This is an absolute statement: “There is no truth in him.” It’s completely distorted.
Now Satan could say true things. He could go out and say, “The leaves on the tree are green, the sky is blue, the water is wet.” But it is all in a framework of falsehood, and therefore, even when he says must be lower-case truth statements, they’re false statements because they are within a false framework.
That’s the problem with a lot of modern science. The whole system is false because the interpretive framework is false. That’s why you end up with people espousing things like global warming or to be technically correct, anthropogenic global warming. Evolution, all of these things, the framework is wrong; the framework excludes God, and so everything they say may be partially true, but it’s partially false, so it can’t be true. So, Jesus says, [John 8:44], “When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”
Slide 18
So, what happens is, that Adam and Eve disobey the Word, because she did not understand the Word or interpret it correctly. He just flat out violates it [the Word]; he disobeys it, and there are results. They both eat of the fruit in Genesis 3:6, and then we see the results.
Slide 19
Genesis 3:7, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.” So what happens because of sin, their eyes are opened to evil, and everything they see is somehow wrong now, even the original creation—naked—is now wrong. They see evil there, so they want to cover it up.
What’s interesting is the word used here, that they made themselves coverings. This word is used a number of times in the Old Testament and about 90 percent of the time, it’s translated as a belt. A belt is something that is very narrow. The idea here is that basically, they’re making loin cloths. They’re not providing much for themselves; it’s rather limited. It’s something that is small. In some places, it’s like a sash that’s around a robe. We’ll get to it at the end.
When God provides a covering for them, it’s the term for a tunic that covers everything. Again, we see the picture of God’s sufficient grace. He’s over abundant in providing a complete covering, and they’re just coming up with this very inadequate, partial covering of themselves. [Genesis 3:7] “Then the eyes of both of them were opened ...”
We see a similar phrase over in Luke when Jesus is on the road to Emmaus with both of the disciples and what does He do there? He takes them through the Law and the Prophets, and He shows them that everything in the Old Testament points to Him, and [Luke 24:31] “their eyes were opened.” That’s the contrast: Adam and Eve disobey God and their eyes are open to evil. Christ takes them through the Word and their eyes are opened to the truth.
This is the breakdown of worship now. They can’t worship and serve God because as we see in Genesis 3:8, they are afraid. [Genesis 3:8] “And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” Why are they doing that?
God asked, and Adam replied in Genesis 3:10, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked.” Now he’s clothed himself, but he still sees himself as exposed and inadequate and weak and naked, and he lacks what he knows he needs. He’s tried to cover it up. That’s often used as a picture of man trying to save himself and solve the problem apart from God, and that’s exactly what it is. Man’s works, man’s efforts, as Isaiah says [Isaiah 64:6], are filthy rags. They cannot solve the problem.
God then asks several questions to expose what has happened, and then we’re going to have what is commonly known as the curse, or God’s oracle where He describes what the consequences of this sin are going to be for the serpent, for the woman, and for the man; we’ve gone over that quite a bit.
Slide 20
What I want to do is skip down to Genesis 3:20 where we begin to see the consequences in reference to worship. When we get down to Genesis 3:20, it says “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” That’s positive, that’s good, but what we see here, what we’ve discovered, is that when we look at archeological discoveries, when we study ancient religions, we see that the ancient Phoenicians perverted this, and this is something we’ll get into a little more next week and the week after, is that you see the perversion of worship take place in the development of world religions.
We have Eve and mother in Hebrew is chawwa. Eve is called this because she’s the mother of the race. It’s the Hebrew letters cheit vav hei. The hei is a feminine ending. In the Phoenician religion, there’s a goddess of the living whose name is chawwat. The “t” at the ending is the feminine ending in Phoenician. You say, “I can see where they would get that; they would have corruption of the story about Eve, and turn this into a goddess.” But there’s more that goes on here because if you look at the depictions of the mother goddess, the mother goddess is a serpent, the mother goddess is a snake. So, this becomes the depiction of the mother of life—the serpent. We see from this how the various world religions developed as degradations of the truth, as perversions and corruptions of the truth.
We see how the serpent shows up across various cultures. There’s a common theme in many pagan religions representing gods or goddesses with serpents. I have been told that if you go to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, that you will see depictions of serpents all inside the tombs. Think about the diadem that the Egyptian pharaoh wore, and it has a cobra on it. So, the serpent shows up again and again within Egyptian religion.
These ancient people, as they rejected God, began to worship the creature instead of the Creator. That comes out of Romans 1:18–23. They are worshiping the serpent rather than God. This leads to a complete perversion of worship, but what we will see when we look at various religions that there are certain things that continue even though they are perverted.
You get the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice shows up in every world religion. You get the idea of the image in the temple, you get the idea that God is the source of blessing and prosperity, but they twist that into the fertility religions, and somehow you have to do something to motivate God to bless you and make you fruitful, and so they pervert that into all sorts of sexual promiscuity.
You go into the temple, and you engage in magic; it’s called sympathetic magic in the temple, so that if you act out something, then the gods will do it in response to what you do. You do something as a mirror of what you want them to do. This is what took place. So you have sexual activity with the temple prostitutes in order to motivate the gods and goddesses to bring more crops and bring more rain and so everything will be fruitful, and you will be prosperous—just an early form of the prosperity gospel. This idea of the serpent runs all the way through.
We see Satan described as the “serpent of old”, in Revelation 12:9, who’s attacking Israel, the woman who flees into the wilderness. We also see a description in Isaiah 11:8 that the child will be able to play by the cobra’s den and not worry about being bitten. In Israel, they did worry about being bitten as they were escaping from Egypt. They went through an area where they were attacked by fiery serpents. It probably refers to the serpent’s bite; it burned, made them feel terrible, feverish, and then they would die.
Slide 21
In order to deliver them, God told Moses to make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole. The pole would indicate its separation from the people, and also the pole would indicate the idea of its being put on a cross. At the Cross, Satan was defeated. God said [Numbers 21:8], “ ‘and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.’ ” It’s an example of faith that is used by Jesus in John 3:14–15, that just precedes the well-known verse, John 3:16, “For God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him”—believing in Him is illustrated by looking at the serpent. That’s how simple faith is. Just looking to God to save you, looking to the Cross, understanding that Christ died for your sins, and you look to the Cross, and you are saved. You live. It’s that simple for understanding faith.
Slide 22
Later on though, we see how truth is perverted because this brazen serpent was kept, it survived, and in the time of Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:4, when he is removing all of these idols from the temple and cleansing the temple, one of the things that is taken out of the temple is the bronze serpent that Moses had made. It is broken to pieces, so it had become an object of worship in their idolatry. What we see is the complete breakdown of truth because the Word of God is not known, and that leads to sin then that leads to further perversion.
Slide 23
The only solution is God’s solution. Genesis 3:21, “Also for Adam and his wife, the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them.” This word that is used for tunic, it’s a good translation, it describes a full-length robe that would completely cover somebody in contrast, as I said earlier, to just this little loin cloth of fig leaves that Adam and Eve made.
Man is insufficient to clothe himself, but God is going to clothe him. And of course, in order for God to clothe him with skins of animals, this brings into focus that these animals had to die. So, the first death occurs at that point; Adam and Eve are going to see this animal die right in front of them because of what they did. That had to be just stunning for them; they had no idea what death was. They had never seen anything die, they’d never seen pain or suffering, and this lamb—we’re going to assume it’s a lamb or a goat—is going to be slaughtered and bleed and bleat, and they will be confronted with the consequences, a very real, graphic consequence in front of them of what sin did. God is going to teach them about this. I believe this is the first sacrifice, and God has to teach them how to take care of the animal, how to slaughter the animal, how to skin the animal, how to treat the hide, so that it will be supple and will be comfortable. There’s a lot more that goes on here, and it may have lasted—this is just summarizing—it may have taken a day or two to develop.
Slide 24
Then they are removed from the Garden, and this army of cherubs is set up. Now that’s an introduction to sacrifice. It’s subtle; it’s not detailed, but more detail will come as we go through. Now remember, where is Moses when he writes this? He’s on the plains of Moab. He is writing down what God the Holy Spirit is inspiring Him to write down. He’s not answering every question, but everything that he’s writing down is well-known to the Jews already. He doesn’t have to go into a lot of detail.
When he first introduces sacrifice, he doesn’t have to tell them what clean and unclean animals are at this point. When we get to Genesis 8, when Noah gets off the ark, actually when God instructs him which animals to take on the ark [Genesis 7:2–3], He said, take two of every unclean and seven of every clean animal. How did Noah know what was clean or unclean? Noah knew what was clean and unclean, and the Jews who were reading this knew what was clean and unclean because they had been practicing this for generations. So Moses doesn’t have to start telling them about the fact that a blood sacrifice is being introduced at this point because they already understand that. They know the story already. So that forms a backdrop to the first sacrifice we see described in Scripture, which is what happens when we get into Genesis 4.
We’ll come back and start there next time and get into what took place there, how that affects worship, and what we will see if you look down to the end of the chapter (Genesis 4), what’s the last thing we read at the end of chapter 4? Seth is born to replace Abel and he has a son that he names Enosh. He’s going to be the third generation, and we’re told at that time then men began to call upon the name of the Lord. That’s going to be an important phrase to understand all the way down through the Old Testament and into the New Testament.
We studied it in the Peter series a little while ago; we’re going to bring out some other things, but we’re going to see that this is part of worship, and what we see here is that it relates to proclaiming Who God is, and what He has done. That proclamation then becomes part of worship. Worship then is going to involve sacrifice, and it’s going to involve proclamation as to Who God is and what He has done. We’ll also see some other aspects begin to be introduced as we go along.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thanks for this time we’ve had together. Help us to think more precisely about Your Word, and about what You have revealed, and to apply these things in our own personal sense of Who You are, and understanding Who You are and what You have done because this should be at the very core of our worship. We must understand that all of our life is to be defined as worship in serving You. We pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”