03.2 - Lesson 03, Part 2: Consequences of the Fall: What Happened to the Perfect Institutions?

Interlocked Series Lesson #03, Part 2
Consequences of the Fall: What Happened to the Perfect Institutions?
August 15, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we’re just thankful that we have grace and that Your grace is sufficient for everything in our lives. You give us the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the filling of the Holy Spirit. You give us Your Word to hide in our heart and Your grace is always sufficient no matter what we’re facing so we just rejoice in that.

“Father, we continue to pray for David Halevy and his family there in Israel. I pray that as he comes here in September and October and talks to various churches that You would put a desire on people’s minds to support them and that ministry there. Father, we’re thankful that they’ve had some financial gifts come in that give them a little breathing room, but they still need to see their monthly giving increase. So, Father, we pray for that.

“We pray for us as we continue our study that we may gain a greater understanding of Your grace and Your goodness and salvation and help with the problems we face as we look at the world around us. We need Your help especially in training our children and grandchildren and the children that You’ve given us to take care of in this congregation.

“Father, we pray that as we study these things that they will refresh us and give us great tools to be able to express and teach Your Word to our kids. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”

Slide 3

Let’s stand up and go through the events that we have in the order of the Scriptures—the 11 Old Testament events and 8 New Testament events. Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, Call of Abraham, then you have the Exodus, and then God gives the Law, the 10 is for the Ten Commandments, and then they go to the Promised Land, and you have the conquest. After the conquest, they set up the kingdom, and then there’s going to be a division. You’ll have the Northern Kingdom, Southern Kingdom, and then God is going to exile them, take them out of the land. There will be a partial return. Now that summarizes the Old Testament.

The New Testament begins with the fulfillment of the promise with the birth of the Messiah. and then He will go to the Cross and die for our sins. He will be buried, and then on the third day He rises from the dead, and then He will ascend to Heaven. He sends the Holy Spirit to begin the church, and we live in the Church Age.

The Church Age ends when He comes in the clouds at the Rapture, and we go to be with the Lord forever. That’s followed by the seven years of tribulation, and then Christ returns to the earth and establishes His kingdom. That kingdom is for a thousand years, and then there will be the Great White Throne Judgment.

Slide 2

We are on Lesson 3, Part 2 of Interlocked, and the issue in Lesson 3 is the consequences of the Fall.

Last week we looked at what happened to human beings as a result of the Fall, and this week we’re looking at what happened to the divine institutions.

Slide 4

The key thing to remember at the very beginning is the Creator-creature distinction, and then you have the divine institutions, and then the fall into sin. That sets the stage for where we are right now.

Slide 5

The focus of Lesson 1 was God’s creation of the heavens and earth and His creation of the human race and His creation of the divine institutions. We know He created the human race to be able to function successfully within the framework of these divine institutions.

He didn’t just sort of throw something together and say, oh, I think I’m going to make a man and a woman and then we’ll put some regulations on him. He had all of this in mind as He created man so that these divine institutions would give structure to the human race’s socialization in marriage and family.

Lesson 2 focused on the wrong views of Creation. Satan introduces the basic concepts of paganism which included the denial of the Creator-creature distinction, and the introduction of this pagan idea of the chain of being. It says that we can be like God and move up and down that chain of being. That’s at the core of all human error.

Last week we started the third lesson. It teaches what happens to the world, what happens to mankind, and what happens to the divine institutions as a result of the Fall.

Slide 6

First of all, we should remember the Creator-creature distinction. Second, that God is the infinite, personal, Creator God, and He is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent, and there’s no God like Yahweh. There is no other.

The creature cannot understand the Creator fully. His ways are not our ways and our ways are not His ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. So, we have to maintain that distinction.

Third, we learned that God created everything out of nothing. You don’t have the eternality of matter or the eternality of chaos or the eternality of these pagan gods and goddesses.

Fourth, God created the first humans, Adam and Eve, in His image to rule over the planet as His representatives. When He created the spirit beings, the angels, they have bodies, they have mentality, they have conscience, they know right from wrong, and they have a self-consciousness and a God-consciousness, but what distinguishes those elements are the fact that God created man to be able to rule over His creation. That’s what distinguishes mankind as God’s image.

He is to be a reflection of God, but because of sin He can’t be much of a reflection of God until you get to the New Testament. Man is saved and we’re being conformed to what in the New Testament? We’re being conformed to the image of Christ.

That’s part of what sanctification is. As we grow and mature, it is to recover the image of God. It’s not lost, but it’s corrupted because of sin or we’re defaced because of sin. There has to be that restoration that comes through sanctification.

Fifth, God created as part of man’s physical nature specific social attributes that are called what? Divine institutions. And they are divine. God has established these and built us so that we function best and most successfully that way. I’m calling them: number one, responsible choice. Second is marriage. And third is family. In this lesson we’ll be dealing with how sin affects these divine institutions as we go forward this evening.

Slide 7

Now the sixth thing is that there are certain things that build a worldview. A worldview is like a set of glasses. You’ve all heard the idiom about people who look at life through rose-colored glasses. Well, some people look at life through pagan-colored glasses. Some people look at life through Marxist-colored glasses. Some people look at life through critical race theory or critical theory-colored glasses. Other people look at life and they just have a kind of a mosaic because they’ve just combine things from lots of different worldviews just to make it kind of work for them.

We want to look at life through a set of glasses that are shaped by the Word of God. That’s called a biblical worldview.

Slide 8

In a biblical worldview, we’ve learned three things so far, that we have the Creator-creature God, He is the personal sovereign God, and He is the ultimate authority.

In contrast, pagan worldview sees a continuity of being. There’s always something that’s existed. There’s no Creator God. And so there’s this scale of being or continuity of being idea. Second, everything is ruled by impersonal fate and chance. There’s no real personal God that is guiding history. Therefore, everything is random. Third, the ultimate authority in all of this is the individual self.

Slide 9

We’re looking at this third lesson, seeing the differences. So far we’ve seen what happened to the perfect world after the Fall, the damage sin did to man. We looked at death of the friendship with God, the death of the body, second death, and eternal separation of the immaterial part of man from the material part.

Slide 10

What happened to the perfect world after the Fall? That’s what we were looking at last time.

Slide 11

Its impact on man. He is spiritually dead. It has broken his relationship with God, his friendship with God. It impacts nature, that is God’s creation changes. We’ll see a little bit more of that this evening. And then its impact on the divine institutions.

Slide 12

We have this chart which explains the significance of evil. As I pointed out last time, people always struggle with evil. You’ll have kids in your class and they’ll go through horrible things. Maybe they have a parent or grandparent die. Maybe they will have some other situation occur at home or maybe at school, and they’re asking the question, why did this happen? And so it’s important to be able to guide them into thinking why there is evil in the world. Why do bad things happen to good people?

We understand this from a biblical viewpoint that everything was perfect and good before the Fall. But because of the Fall, everything fell apart. The problem is sin. The problem is not that the existence of the human race in the sense that, well, they’re messing up the planet, so we just need to reduce the population to limit the damage, because we have to make sure that for some reason the planet survives. We’re not here to serve the planet rather that the planet is to serve us.

That’s part of the problem at the root of a lot of environmentalism. And there’s a difference between the environmentalist theory as in terms of modern environmentalism versus the biblical view of responsible dominion, responsible care of the planet. And even though there may be some things that are similar, it’s not the similarities that are important. It’s the differences and the motivation and the understanding.

In the biblical worldview we understand that God is in control and the Lord Jesus Christ sustains the universe. Day in and day out He holds it together and if He were to relax it for one second it would just disappear. The existence of evil is abnormal. It’s introduced into human history because of sin.

Eventually there will be a judgment of sin, and then God will send those who have rebelled against Him, the fallen angels, to the lake of fire (because the lake of fire was originally created for the fallen angels), He will send them to the lake of fire and then that will be restricted off. There’s a beginning and an end to evil. No other system has an answer to the problem of evil.

This means we can trust God. We may not understand it all. We may not understand why God allows so much to take place right now but we will at some point. We just have to trust God that because He’s omniscient, He knows more about it than we do. He’s going to take care of that.

Slide 13

We saw that sin damaged man’s immaterial nature. Before there was sin man was composed of three parts—his physical body, his human soul, and a human spirit, which enabled his soul to have a relationship with God and to understand the things of the Spirit of God.

After sin, all man has is a body and a soul, and so there’s no relationship. He’s alive, but he’s spiritually dead. He’s physically alive and spiritually dead.

Slide 14

The result of that is that every human being is abnormal. They’ve got intellectual problems. They can’t solve every issue in life. They can’t understand everything in life because they’re divorced from the Creator. They’re spiritually abnormal because they’re separated from God.

God was once their friend, the one with whom they had fellowship, the one they could communicate with. Now they’re separated from God. They are emotionally abnormal and they are physically abnormal. The problem is sin.

Christians too often just do not have a very robust concept of sin. We don’t know quite what to do with it.

We had a question that came into Dean Bible Ministries where somebody asked what if they can’t think of any sins they’ve committed. My response was, well, just confess arrogance because that’s probably what’s going on. And start with self-sufficiency. Or confess that you just haven’t trusted God because Scripture says that anything apart from faith is sin.

I think the more mature we become, and the more we read Scripture, the more sinful we realize we are. It’s not difficult to come up with five or six or ten thousand sins that we just committed in the last hour, because we are rebellious creatures, and the heart is still deceitful and wicked above all things. Who can know it? Only God.

If we start with something else besides sin as the problem, then the solutions are false. That’s what we see in our culture. They have removed sin from the culture. Part of that is the result of the influence of Sigmund Freud. He hated Christianity, and he hated the concept of sin, and he did everything he could to give human beings a rationale and justification for doing what they did, and that it wasn’t sinful. That everything is okay because that’s just the way we are.

Slide 15

Scripture says in Romans 3:10–12, “As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one.’ ” Not one of us is born righteous. Second, “ ‘There is none who understands.’ ” Being divorced from God in spiritual death, we don’t understand God, and we don’t seek God. We may want to know something about what’s out there, but we really, as a spiritually dead person, are divorced from any concept of what that might be.

It’s only the grace of God through common grace that God the Holy Spirit enables us to desire to know whatever there might be. Romans 3:12 is quoted from different Psalms, “ ‘They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.’ ” None of us is inherently capable of doing that which is righteous.

Slide 16

The choice in the Garden of Eden was to live. What we were supposed to do was to live dependently on the Creator God. But what Eve did and then Adam did was to act independently of God to decide what was right and what was wrong on their own. That was their choice.

Slide 17

Sinless man had a conscience that was grounded in what God had revealed. For us, after salvation, our conscience should be formed by what’s in the Word of God. What did Adam say after he sinned? He blamed the woman.  It’s the woman you gave me. We’re always blaming others and we think we never do anything wrong because we believe we’re really basically good.

Don’t you just love it when you hear about some person who just killed a family? Ran over two or three kids in the street and the reporters go and they interview people that knew them and say, “I just can’t believe little Johnny did that. He’s such a good person.” You’ll hear that on the news. They interview their friends who say he’s really good. No, he’s not. Neither are you. Neither am I. We’re all sinners.

When we start with a flawed concept of who we are as fallen, spiritually dead people, then the solutions are all going to be the wrong solutions.

Slide 18

At the end of Romans 1 and the beginning of Romans 2, Paul says, regarding the Gentiles who have in their conscience an understanding of right and wrong, “Who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same—they commit the same sins, the same actions—but also approve of those who practice them. Therefore, you are inexcusable.”

You are without excuse. Every human being is without excuse because, back to Romans 1 it says we all know that God exists because God had made it evident to us and made it manifest within us. There’s nobody that can say he just didn’t know God existed because God makes it abundantly clear so that none are without excuse.

So he says that whenever you judge someone else, you condemn yourself, because every one of us will do the same at some point. How many times do you say this? I don’t want anybody volunteering, but how many times do we say some negative comment about somebody and then maybe a month or two later all of a sudden we realize we’re doing the same thing. We all do that. That’s Paul’s point here.

Slide 19

As we get into this second half [of Lesson 3] we have to think about how sin damaged people and how people try to fix it apart from God. What are the ways that human beings try to do to try to fix it?

Slide 20

Some people believe that they can make themselves whole again, so they seek all kinds of different things.

This is what’s almost inherent in advertising. You look at a lot of the products that are advertised, and they are going to make you beautiful, and they’re going to make you healthy, and they’re going to give you a long and wonderful life. They’re even going to give you a fantastic love life. All kinds of things are promised from all kinds of products.

The clothes being advertised are going to make you look handsome or sexy or whatever. The food is going to not only be pleasurable, but it’s going to make you healthy and all kinds of other things to try to make us whole again. Because we’ve been emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually damaged by sin. But they try to do this on the basis of ignoring God.

I remember when I was in my first or second year or so as a pastor, There was a couple in my church whose son had gone through seminary with me, and he was a solid guy. They were a hardworking couple and they had gotten involved in selling a vitamin product and they had been quite successful. They had bought a new car from their profits so they sort of enticed me into trying to sell some vitamins to make a little extra money.

I signed up and went to one of the sales meetings. As I sat there listening to it, I thought that if you just substituted Jesus Christ for the name of their product, you would have an evangelistic message. What you’re promising through your product is everything that a person gets in salvation. That was just a real eye-opener for me, and that was the last time I was enticed into being a salesperson.

Slide 21

We have to understand that there’s not anything necessarily wrong with the details of life, because that’s what we’re talking about here. The only thing wrong is thinking they’re going to give us what only God can give us. We have things we want so shopping is high on our list of pleasures. We are thinking that money and the things that money can buy will somehow give us a fuller life. But shopping doesn’t satisfy a spiritually dead person. It just leaves him hollow inside.

People are looking for things that will give them meaning and value and significance to their life but sooner or later that’s going to fall apart. Or others are looking to education and achievement and being able to do well in their career. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things unless you think that’s going to solve the ultimate problem caused by sin.

Some people think being healthy by taking pills and supplements will make them happy. Others look to drugs and alcohol and lots of other things to deaden the pain that is in their life. They think that if they just have the right tool, if they just have the right kind of clothes, if they just have the right kind of car or the right kind of phone or if they get a life coach or find a doctor who will give them the right kind of medication, they’re going to be able to overcome this lack of meaning and purpose in their life.

Scripture teaches us that the basic problem is spiritual death and the destiny of man isn’t just that he lacks meaning or purpose or value, but that he is destined for eternity in the lake of fire, for eternal punishment.

Slide 22

We have to come to understand that the problem is inherent sin. We need to communicate this to the kids in our life.

We have to figure out ways to communicate to young kids from an early age. You’re going to get lots of illustrations of disobedience that you can use with them because they’re going to be disobedient to you and they’re going to be irresponsible. When they’re disobedient, talk to them about why they are disobedient and help them to understand things like sin and that they’re responsible for what they do.

A tool that’s good to use for the young children is the Yes button and the No button, which stands for their volition, their choice. When they do something wrong, help them see it was because they “pushed” their No button and disobeyed God’s rules. When they do something right, help them see they’re using their Yes button in obedience to God.

As the kids grow you can teach them additional concepts related to that. Make sure they understand that sin is the problem and that Satan doesn’t want us to realize that. He wants to distract us. He uses all the glitz, the glamour, the products, the material possessions, and the things that stimulate our emotions as a way of distracting us into thinking that somehow we can make life work apart from God. That doesn’t need a lot of encouragement from our sin nature because our sin nature gravitates to that temptation that we can make life work apart from God.

I think it’s important to recognize that this is an abstract concept but explain that we can do things to honor God and to glorify Him. We are to live our life because God has a plan and a purpose for our lives. They may not understand that when they’re two or when they’re three or when they’re five or seven. If you say it over and over again and often enough that when they get to a point where they’re beginning to grasp that, it’s going to have significant weight. Because you started teaching them that and saying that when they were younger, then their brains have been formatted for that concept.

I think way too many parents start too late to try to teach these concepts. They’re waiting until they think the kids are old enough to understand. If you do that then you’re going to be a failure as a parent, because they have to start understanding disobedience and the consequences of disobedience from the time they come out of the womb.

I’m not saying it has to be harsh, but you can give a six-month-old baby just a little pat on the padded diapers. Just because he senses that he’s done something that made you unhappy, he’s going to scream bloody murder and cries as if you just beat him over the head with a baseball bat. They will begin to learn there are some unpleasant things that come as a result of making decisions that are not right. The problem is inherent sin and ultimately the only solution is the divine solution which begins at the Cross.

As they mature talk about that when we’re saved we are redeemed, we have been purchased from the slave market of sin. The Scripture also uses, as we saw on Sunday morning in the passage in Ephesians 4:30, that we are not to grieve the Holy Spirit, because we have been sealed by the Spirit until the day of what? Redemption.

There’s a use of the word redemption that talks about what happened at the Cross where Christ paid the penalty for our sin. Redemption when we realize it when we trust Christ as Savior. This also anticipates phase three, glorification, when we realize that redemption. Redemption is also applied to what happens when God solves the problem of the corruption on the earth.

Kids will begin at some point to ask why are we here? Even before they ask, tell them we’re here to serve God. We’re here to glorify God. We’re here to obey the Lord. We’re not here just to be happy. God has a meaning and purpose for your life. It’s valuable because of what you’re going to do for the Lord. It’s going to count for eternity. Your life right now, the decisions that we make, are going to have eternal consequences.

We have another problem, and that’s that Satan seeks to distract us from the real problem and the only solution. He tries to minimize sin. You see this a lot with Christians who get caught up with the world’s solutions and Satan’s solutions. Kids will try to find something to give some meaning and purpose to their lives apart from the Scriptures. The result of that is usually just more problems.

When we try to solve our problems our way instead of God’s way, it makes things worse. That’s what Adam and Eve did. They tried to solve their problem apart from God and decide whether or not they should eat the fruit and just look at the horrible consequences. We have to make sure that we do things God’s way.

If we follow Satan’s solution, then we discover eventually that it is superficial. It’s useless. It makes matters worse. Sadly, a lot of Christians buy into Satan’s solutions, and the result of that is that they just sort of baptize these satanic solutions and slap Christian names on them.

That’s what Christian psychology does. Basically, it borrows all the methodologies and all the analysis and everything from the pagan systems and just changes the names to biblical names to make it sound like it was Christian rather than starting from the Scripture. Scripture is sufficient. You don’t need to go read secular psychologists or self-help books.

Slide 23

This just brings us back to the fact that while there’s nothing wrong with the money or the things that money can buy, having things, shopping, enjoying that, getting a good education, having a career and being successful, being healthy, all of these other things. They’re not an answer. Stay away from the self-help books. That’s usually the biggest section in a bookstore, if you still go to a bookstore.

I remember back when I’d go to a Christian bookstore, which I haven’t seen in 20 years. Some of you may remember Mills Bible Bookstore that was down in Garden Oaks. Do any of you remember that? You’d go in there and find good theology books and Bible studies and commentaries, and it was filled with good stuff. The family closed it, I think, in the 90s.

After that, you’d go to a Baptist bookstore or you’d go to some other Bible bookstore and 90% of the books in there were Christian self-help books. I remember one particular author and one particular book that was designed to help men be men. And it was written by a Christian guy who’d been a pastor who had “baptized” solutions with theological terms.

The way you’d really find out the Christian books that weren’t really biblical was you’d go to a New Age bookstore. There used to be a New Age bookstore in a shopping center about two or three miles from where Tommy Ice lived in South Austin back in the 80s called the Bodhi Tree. Anybody know what a Bodhi Tree is? Oh, y’all are so sheltered. Buddha sat under a Bodhi Tree and meditated. So it was called the Bodhi Tree and it was all this New Age mysticism and everything in there.

Tommy and I would go through there and pick out all the Christian books by so-called evangelicals that we knew that were being sold at the New Age bookstore. That tells you a whole lot about what New Age people thought of what these books were saying. It was just the same thing, baptized by Christians. Christians weren’t smart enough to see that. That’s why God calls us sheep. It’s not a compliment.

Anyway, we get distracted by Satan’s solutions just as Eve got distracted by Satan’s solution. We always have to be careful with that.

Slide 24

In the pagan worldview, good and evil coexist. So that means that there’s not ultimately any real difference. Evil is necessary. Good is necessary. There’s nothing that’s normal. Evil is normal.

Slide 25

What we learn in the biblical worldview is sin damaged nature. Now, I think this is really important to help kids learn, and you can do a lot with your young kids as they get a little bit older in school and they start learning some things in school related to pagan environmentalism.

One of the things you can do is if there’s a volcanic eruption somewhere on the planet, is to help them see how to research what is that volcano putting up into the atmosphere? What are the chemicals that are coming out of that volcano? How much is coming out, let’s say in a 24-hour period, compared to the production of those kinds of harmful things, or so-called harmful things, based on man’s industrial production.

You have things that come up where you get a certain huge amount of carbon dioxide that’s being thrown into the atmosphere, The environmentalists scream and say, that’s going to destroy the planet. No, it’s just going to make it greener. It feeds all of the plants.

Why is carbon dioxide so bad? How many people here could tell me off the top of their head what percentage of the Earth’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide? You know the answer. It’s like 0.04, right? 0.04 to 0.06. That’s the range it should be. Most people if you ask them that question, they’re going to say 12%, 15%, something outrageous. If it’s less than 0.04%, we’re going to die. And if it’s more than 0.06%, we’re going to die, too. So how come it stays in that range? We’re going to find out a few things as we go forward.

Slide 26

What happens in the curse in Genesis 3:17–19 is that God, after talking to the serpent and outlining the curse to the serpent and then to Eve, He says to Adam, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: Cursed is the ground—the earth—for your sake.”

Wait a minute. Did you catch that last prepositional phrase? God cursed the earth for our sake. Think about that. Weeds and thistles and thorns. Because if it had stayed the way it was, then life would be too easy and we’d think we didn’t have a problem. God brings judgment there because that toil, that hardship now, is designed to teach us some things. “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it.”

There was responsible labor prior to this. There were tasks that needed to be done, but there was no resistance. There was no problem. It was 100% joyful. There was no sweat of the brow. There was no difficulty. There were no weeds. There were no thistles and thorns. Now God’s creation is fighting back and so it’s much more difficult in a fallen world to fulfill the creation mandate to rule over the planet.

Genesis 3:18 says, “Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the fruit, the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you are taken; For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” That’s the first mention of physical death. It’s not the death that occurred when they ate from the fruit. It’s the result of that.

What’s important is to go to the New Testament because we have a passage that is not one of Greta Thunberg’s favorite, but it should be because she’d understand that as much as she blames the human race for all of the evils of environmental problems, she’s not even scratching the surface on the extreme damage that the human race has actually done to the planet. What she talks about is all superficial.

Slide 27

Romans 8 says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”

Think about that! No matter how hard it is, no matter what suffering you’ve gone through, it’s nothing compared to the glory we have waiting for us. “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.” The impersonal creation of God is groaning right now. In Romans 8:22 it goes on to say that the creation desires or looks forward to God and the sons of God, meaning Church Age believers being revealed, “for the creation was subjected to futility—to emptiness—not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope.”

God subjects the creation in hope. God curses it for Adam’s sake back in Genesis 3, and here we’re told that God subjected it to this corruption in hope. There’s going to be a future redemption. It’s all tied together, and this is what needs to be investigated to build a robust biblical view of the environmental problem.

Romans 8:21 says, “Because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.”

Slide 28

Don’t you love those thorns? There is a tree in a place called Beit She’an in Israel. I just love going there. Some of you have been there with me when I’ve gone there. The tree has thorns that are like an inch to an inch and a half long, and they just completely cover every limb, the trunk, everything. If you were to slap your hand on the trunk, you would be pierced by 12 or 18 thorns. It is the most wicked tree that I have ever seen.

Slide 29

Another example the Kwoks give in the notes is Krakatoa. Krakatoa is another natural evil. We call them natural disasters, but it’s a natural evil. In 1883, the explosion of the volcanic island of Krakatoa, which is located down here in Indonesia, killed more than 36,000 people. That’s bigger than a lot of Texas towns.

It was so loud that it was heard 3,000 miles away. See that circle? It’s 3,000 miles from the epicenter. That means that they heard it in Japan. They heard it in northern China. They heard it down to southeastern Australia. And they heard it as far as India. The clouds, the ash, darkened the sky as far away as England and it created so much volcanic dust in the upper atmosphere that it reflected the heat of the sun away from the planet. The next couple of winters were very cold because of that impact. Have your kids research volcanoes and the damage that they do to reinforce in their minds what happened because of the fall.

Slide 30

What happened to the perfect institutions that God created?

Slide 31

Remember, the first divine institution is responsible choice. Now, I like that because it’s a good umbrella term, but it covers some other things. Man was responsible for work, for production, for labor, for tending the Garden, for keeping it, protecting it, all of these things, and to rule over the planet. Once you have sin, then it damages Creation. It damages and changes the animals.

We know that all of the animals that God created were herbivores. That means they were designed to just eat  vegetation. But what happens? It’s not long before they change and they’re eating meat. They’re killing one another. That happens between the period of the Fall and the Flood.

That’s where you have the development of, I believe, a lot of these more vicious dinosaurs like T-Rex and other things. Now they didn’t die out at the Flood because Noah took from whatever the kinds were. Kind is not equivalent to species. It’s a little higher than that—maybe equivalent to family. But he took those on the ark with him.

I had a song leader when I was pastoring a church in Irving, Texas, who was getting his master’s degree in paleontology at SMU. He had to keep his identity or his belief in creationism secret. He said that what’s fascinating is reptiles never stop growing. When you have human beings living 900 years before the Flood, and you have dinosaurs that are reptiles, and they don’t stop growing for 900 years, they’re going to get fairly large.

The dinosaurs on the ark were young and small. There was plenty of room for them. They’re not eating voraciously like they would if they were much larger. The large dinosaurs were killed in the Flood, and that’s going to produce these huge cemeteries of dinosaur bones that are found in various locations. Once the ones on the ark get off, the climate changes rapidly. It’s just in a state of flux for the next one to two thousand years, so the dinosaurs didn’t survive.

There are a couple of books out that Institute for Creation Research publishes. I think you can also get some from Answers in Genesis, where people have gone back and they’ve traced the dragon legends back to England and Scandinavia and Western Europe. If you go back and, for example, you read Beowulf and you try to sketch out what the monster looks like in Beowulf, it’s amazingly similar to a T-Rex. It had little short forearms that have no strength in them, and teeth that are huge, and a tail that’s like the trunk of a tree. This is really fascinating.

When early Western Europeans went into the Amazon forest, there were stories of dragons and dinosaur-type creatures that were within the living memory of the tribe. This kind of stuff is ignored. Somewhere I’ve got some slides that John Morris gave me of things that were discovered in the coal mines in West Virginia. His father, Henry Morris, who founded ICR, had taught at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, taught engineering and hydraulics back in the early 1950s. Later he taught in Houston at Rice. He went to this little church in a Quonset Hut downtown. Some of you know where that was.

About 1953 or 54, he went out to Western Virginia. He had coal miners in his church, and they would tell him that if they were cutting into a new vein of coal and discovered a skull, they had to call in someone from the Smithsonian Institute.

He gave me a picture of something they found. It’s a bell with a Baal figure on top of it. I mean, it’s a well-crafted and designed brass bell that’s about this high [he indicates 3–4 inches]. That was found embedded in a vein of coal. How did that happen? That just magically appeared? The story the evolutionists tell is that it took millions of years to form that coal, and there weren’t any humans alive at that time.

Every time the coal miners discovered something like that, they’d have to call in the Smithsonian Institute. They’d close off that particular tunnel, and they would go in and remove anything and everything that didn’t fit the evolutionary theory, and they’d take it back like the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones in the movie Ark of the Covenant. And they would put it in a box and hide it in a warehouse somewhere.

Just a side note. Don’t trust your government—especially when they tell you to go get a vaccine. That’s just my opinion. My mother always told me, don’t trust the government. They’re not in it for your health.

Slide 32

What we see, sinful man now abuses the good things. Food is good. Drink is good. Work, labor is good. Taking care of your health is a good thing. All of these things are good, but we idolize them.

We begin to worship them. Some people are real foodies, and they have no discipline when it comes to what they eat. There are others who go in the opposite direction, and they try to avoid food, and they have certain eating disorders. All of these are just the results of sinful approaches by man to the creation.

In labor, you either overwork and you’re a workaholic and you ignore your family, your spouse, and everything else, or you just go to the other extreme and you’re lazy and you’re irresponsible. The Book of Proverbs focuses on that a lot.

Maybe you just get so obsessed with your physique that you’re at the gym for four hours every day and you probably are not paying attention to other responsibilities. On the other hand, you just don’t take care of your health. And consequently, when you get to be about 75 to 80, all of those bad decisions that you never dealt with are going to come back and haunt you with a series of physical difficulties.

For many people the main purpose in life is pleasure. You don’t know how to properly enjoy what God has provided.

Slide 33

The Bible talks about why people sin. What did Adam do after he disobeyed God? God showed up. Adam and Eve ran and hid. They had already tried to cover themselves up by sewing fig leaves together.

Slide 38

Adam says to God that the woman You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree. Notice, it’s the woman You gave me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate. Then the Lord asked the woman, said, what did you do? And the woman said the serpent deceived her. They’re both saying it’s not their fault. I’m basically good, God. It’s that woman You gave me. If You hadn’t given her to me, I’d be okay.

Slide 37

What we want to do is we want to pass the buck, and we want to blame others. We have a whole society now built around psychology and sociology that has ignored God. We do what we do because everything’s physical and material, chemical. It’s just our genetic makeup is how we justify it.

We say it’s not my fault. That’s just the way I’m made. It’s all about my genes or it was my parents. They did this or they didn’t do this. They didn’t take care of me. So now I have a problem because of my awful parents. Or maybe it’s because I was abused as a child or these things happened to me and I went through these kinds of tragedies in my life.

What about the people who have bad genes and were successful and don’t have your problems? What about the people who had really bad parents and were very successful? What about that? People have volition, they have personal choice and responsible choice.

Slide 39

But we tend to look for things that will shift the blame. There are a couple of different ways in which people try to handle some of these problems.

When they don’t have God, then they’ve got to figure out how to handle their problems. What happens is often they take on victimization. There’s a good explanation for this on pages 12 through 15 in your notes. One of the things that happens at the beginning of this is that people lose hope. They lose the meaning of life and the purpose in life because they don’t see anyone in control. Things are chaotic.

They don’t understand that there’s a value to life. And so they decide that life is basically meaningless. There’s no purpose. There’s no rhyme or reason to things. And so, in a worst-case scenario, they will become suicidal and decide to take their own life. They think that that’s a good choice because of what they think about death.

What you think about death will often influence what you do in life. You have many people today that have picked up a lot of ideas from Eastern mysticism and Eastern religions, such as reincarnation. Reincarnation was repackaged for the West. If you live in India or you live in the Far East where you have Hinduism and Buddhism that teach reincarnation. Reincarnation means that if you don’t do well in this life, then you’re going to come back as a gnat, or you’re going to come back as a lizard, or you’re going to come back some other unpleasant animal form.

The way these religions are taught and packaged for Western Europeans and Americans is that you’ll just come back as maybe a poor person, but you always come back as a human. You don’t come back as a rat. You don’t come back as a possum. You don’t come back as a gecko. You’re not a lower life form.

I’ve known some people who just accept they’re going to die and that’s it. There’s nothing. What about meaning in life? If you just think everything is just the end of your existence and that’s it, there’s no future, what are you living for?

Some people just manufacture something to live for. Other people get overwhelmed by that, and so killing themselves just sort of ends it, and they don’t want to deal with that emotional pain. Still others say we’re just recycled into nature in some way, and that’s good, and then others believe in reincarnation.

Slide 40

Their basic thinking is that because no one is in control, there’s no purpose in life. And so they conclude that life is meaningless.

Slide 41

That’s not what Scripture says. Scripture says, “it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment.” So there’s no second chance or third chance. You’re not going to come back as something else. You’re not going to be recycled. You’re not going to be reincarnated as somebody nice. You won’t have a better chance in that life. You die once, and after this the judgment.

Slide 42

That judgment is harsh. We looked at Matthew 25:46 last time at the Sheep and Goat Judgment. The goats, who represent unbelievers will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous, called the sheep, into eternal life.

The English translation here in the New King James Version uses everlasting and eternal to translate the same word. It’s the same Greek word, AIONIOS, in both cases. So you’ve got to translate them both the same way because they’re both talking about eternal life. If the life that we get in salvation is eternal, then the punishment is also eternal. It’s never ending.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say maybe it’s a little different. God’s going to annihilate them at the end. It’s not eternal. I don’t understand it. People are uncomfortable with it. But I know that’s what the Bible teaches, and it’s very clear. You have this same Greek word, eternal, over and over again.

Slide 43

The second thing we see is that because people can’t escape the injustice of the world and they can’t escape their personal pain or disappointment or depression, but they don’t want to kill themselves, so they just try to dull the pain. They abuse drugs and alcohol and entertainment and food. A lot of times what’s at the core of a lot of people’s sinful behavior is that they’re just trying to deal with some misery in their life.

Slide 44

Third, we have people who don’t lose hope because they find something that will give their life meaning. That’s very existential. It might be they decide they’re going to help the homeless or devote themselves to a cause of social justice. I think that’s part of the explanation for why we see a lot of these social justice movements is that this whole thing is attractive to people who’ve lost meaning and hope. They can give themselves to some cause and improve the lot of humanity and reform the world.

All of these come out of a victim mentality. I’m a victim, everything’s bad, and so you either are going to just give up and do yourself in, or you’re going to try to make some kind of meaning to make it better for the next person.

Slide 45

In contrast to the victim mentality, the Bible teaches that God demands personal accountability and responsibility from each person. Ezekiel 18:20 says, “The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son.”

We don’t bear guilt because of what our parents or our children do. They’re individually responsible for the choices that they make. “The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.”

Slide 46

2 Corinthians 5:10 says “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil.”

Slide 47

That’s the choice. The choice is to depend upon God and do what God says to do or to try to be independent of God and make life work on your own terms.

Slide 48

The essence of victimhood is entitlement. As parents you can see kids think that they’re entitled to certain things. They think they deserve certain things. This should be dealt with very, very early.

Victimhood says, I’m a victim and everybody does all these things. There’s no way I can get out of the quicksand on my own. Then the other end is that I’m entitled to everything. I need to be in control and everybody else needs to take care of me and give me everything that I want. When that doesn’t happen both paths end up with a sense of hopelessness. So that’s the first divine institution. Everyone must choose their path in life.

Slides 49 and 50

The second divine institution of marriage is being attacked. We see that as a result of the curse there’s going to be a conflict in marriage because now you have two sinners who both think they’re entitled to deification. They want to be like God. That’s going to be a conflict because you can’t have “two gods” running the marriage. It never worked in mythology.

God brought this judgment on the woman and He said, “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; In pain you will bring forth children.” That’s physical labor pains. Some people say they can’t imagine that women wouldn’t have had pain in labor before the Fall, but it was a different world before the Fall, and things worked differently, and things would have worked out very smoothly.

“In pain you shall bring forth children and your desire …” That’s not a sexual desire. It’s a desire to control. It’s used that way in the next chapter in Genesis 4 when God warns Cain about sin and says sin is like a crouching animal and its desire is to control you.

Slide 51

In Matthew 19:4, Jesus addressed the problem of divorce, “Moses gave a writ of divorcement because of the hardness of your hearts.” Sin affects marriage and it affects families.

Slide 52

There are evil alternatives to marriage in our culture. We have to teach that to our kids as they get older because they’re going to hear things in schools and they’re going to see it on TV. As much as you try to protect them, they’re going to get exposed to it.

Especially they’ll be exposed to all of the hideous stuff that goes on with LGBTQ Pride Month and Pride parades and all of these other things. We have alternatives to biblical marriage that have been legalized. Marriage between a man and a man; or a woman and a woman; or adults and a child; or multiple men and one woman; multiple men, multiple women. You know, it just goes on and on.

Slide 53

Anything but God’s design for marriage, which is one man and one woman for life.

Slide 54

The third institution is family. After sin entered the world there’s conflict that occurs in the family. The first family had a problem.

Slide 55

In Genesis 4:8, Cain and Abel had different approaches to God, and God accepted Abel’s sacrifice, but not Cain’s. This angered Cain and so Cain killed his brother.

Slide 56

Because of man’s rebellion the Scriptures say that God gave them over to their lusts. He told them that He would pull back the restraints some and they would see how awful life would be.

Romans 1:18–20, and Romans 1:19 says that what’s known about God is clear from His creation. It’s manifest in them internally. They know, even the most devout atheist knows in his heart of hearts God exists. God has shown it to them. His invisible attributes are clearly seen.

Slide 57

We see in Romans 1:21–23 that the foolish hearts of man are darkened as a result of sin. They claim to be smart and intellectual, but when they reject God, they become fools, and they change the glory of the incorruptible God into an image like corruptible man—birds and four-footed animals.”

Slide 58

It goes on in Romans 1:24–25 dealing with the issue of man being designed for responsibility.

Instead, God gives them up to their sin nature, to uncleanness, lust. They dishonor their bodies. They exchange the truth of God for the lie. And they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.

Slide 59

Romans 1:26–27. This is a good thing to go through with the kids taking a lot more time than I’m taking tonight. God gives them up to vile passion, Romans says.

All of this sexual immorality and homosexuality is an attack on the second divine institution of marriage.

Slide 60

That leads to the collapse of the family and the disruption of the family.

Slide 61

In Romans 1:28–31 you have a list of a range of sins. This is not exhaustive, and it just shows what some of the problems are.

Slide 62

The divine institutions are like interconnected blocks with each institution building upon the previous one. When they’re not there, societies cannot be strong without strong families. We will not have strong families without strong marriages. And we won’t have strong marriages unless individuals are making good, responsible choices. It all fits together.

The divine institutions, the foundation of Western Civilization, are under attack like they have never been under attack before. In our culture we’re not winning anywhere. It’s leading to a collapse.

Slide 63

In the Bible, God showed Adam the garden He had made, and then God spoke to him so he would know how to fulfill His commands. Today God shows us His Creation. And His Word, the Bible, and tells us how to live within His Creation.

Slide 64

In conclusion, if we ignore God, we will face the consequences. Galatians 6:7 says, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.”

Slide 65

There were consequences to what Adam and Eve had done. They were taken out of the Garden in Genesis 3:22–23.

Slide 66

In Genesis 3:24, they’re driven out and an army of cherubs (cherubim is plural). There’s an army of cherubs that surround the Garden to prevent any humans from coming back.

Slide 67

We now live in an abnormal world but there is a time when evil will be cordoned off and restricted and limited to the lake of fire and we will live in normality. When things are chaotic and not going the way we want, we have to remember Romans 8:18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this world are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.”

That covers Lesson three. We’ll come back next time and start with Lesson four.

Closing Prayer

“Father, thank You for this opportunity to look at these consequences of sin and how sin so totally disrupted the creation, that nothing was left untouched by Adam’s sinful choice. All that we see around us is something that we know is not normal. It’s not right. There’s injustice. There’s evil. There’s criminality. There’s pain. There’s sorrow. There’s suffering.

“People have serious problems with their lives because of sin. The solution starts at the Cross. And the only solution begins by trusting in Christ as Savior. Ultimately this will all be resolved when we have the new heaven and the new earth.

“Father, thank You for the way in which You revealed Your Word to us. It causes us to think, think, think significantly about what has happened, why it has happened, and what You are trying to teach us in all of this. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”