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Treason. The offense of attempting to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance, or of betraying the state into the hands of a foreign power.
Disloyalty. Treachery. It's no wonder R .C.
Sproul called sin cosmic treason. It's a topic we don't really like to hear about much these days.
Sin. We know why the world doesn't like it, but some even in churches don't want to hear about the doctrine of sin.
But friends, we are realists, aren't we? Sin, as one man said, has more empirical evidence that exists for this than anything else in the world.
And we know we're sinful people. John Calvin said,
No one knows the one hundredth part of the sin that clings to his soul.
The really bad news is, as Thomas Watson said, Sin has the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages.
We need a Redeemer, don't we? We need redemption. We need someone who stands in the middle of God and man.
We need an umpire. We need an arbiter. We need a mediator. Sirhan Sirhan killed
Robert Kennedy, and then he said right afterwards, They can gas me, but I'm famous.
I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do.
How do we solve the sin problem? Well, Ruth 3 ends with a cliffhanger.
Ruth 3 is almost like when I was growing up and there were cereals. Remember cereals? For me, it was tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.
And I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen. Ruth 3 is like this cliffhanger. We've got a couple.
They're in love. They want to get married. But there's a kinsman who's closer. Will he redeem them?
Or will Boaz and Ruth get married? How's the book going to end?
In the book of Ruth chapter 1, we start off with three funerals. Will chapter 4 end with a wedding?
Will chapter 4 end with children? It's a cliffhanger. What's going to happen next?
Ruth needs redemption. She needs a kinsman redeemer. She needs a blood relative who will pay the price of redemption.
She needs a self -sacrificial man of valor. Ruth needs a redeemer physically.
And we, beloved, need a redeemer spiritually. If her need physically for a redeemer was great, our need for a redeemer because of sin is greater.
And if you remember how great your sin is, your redemption will be much sweeter.
Redemption is sweeter when you realize how expensive redemption is.
Turn your Bibles this morning to Genesis chapter 3. Since Ruth has an interlude, we're going to do our own interlude in Genesis chapter 3 and talk about sin, the fall of man, and its consequences.
For Ruth, she knew how valuable it was for her to have a redeemer.
She knew the need. She knew the dire consequences for not having a redeemer. And this morning, we're going to remind ourselves about the problem of evil and the fall of mankind and how one trespass led to the condemnation of all men, as Romans 5 says.
And as we study this, I think it will be helpful as we can quickly tell how much
Ruth needed a physical redeemer. Do we need a spiritual mediator and how badly do we need him?
And when we realize how great our sin is, our praise in our Savior who's overcome sin for us should increase.
Now, Genesis chapter 3 describes the fall, but let me read a few verses in Genesis chapter 2, this ideal setting, this idyllic setting, this
Edenic setting, and then we'll see the contrast in chapter 3.
We need a redeemer. It says, though, in Genesis chapter 2, verse 15, notice when you see the word
L -O -R -D, all capitals, that would be Yahweh, a covenant -keeping
God, a gracious God in His name. The Lord God, it says in Genesis 2 .15,
took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the
Lord God commanded the man, saying, You shall surely eat of every tree of the garden. Notice that. You shall surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die.
Then the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make a helper fit for him.
Verse 21, So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.
Then the man said, This is a poem. It's a jubilation.
This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.
Therefore a man, Moses writes, shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
And now we come to the catastrophic next chapter.
It is historical, but it's more than that. It's theological. Now lots of people when they come to Genesis chapter 3 with the fall of mankind, they think it's a myth.
And they say, This only happened in the mind of Eve. This didn't really happen on earth.
There's no Eden. It just happened in Eve's mind. This is written as theological history.
Hosea confirms it. Isaiah confirms it. Romans confirms it. 1 Timothy confirms it.
This is a historical account, but it's also theological. And it follows creation, one of the most amazing stories, true stories in all the
Bible, far -reaching events, and this is even reaching as far.
Some say there never was an Adam. There never was an Eve. This is a parable. You've got a talking serpent.
You've got all these things going on here. It's all symbolism. How do we describe evil getting into the system?
This is just kind of our little story. Let's take a look at it and find out. And again, my premise this morning is, as Ruth left us as a cliffhanger, will there be redemption?
Let's just pause for a moment as we're looking at Ruth to remember how great our
Savior is and how badly sinners need a mediator.
Look at the temptation found in Genesis 3, verse 1 and following. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the
Lord, Yahweh, God, Elohim, that the covenant -keeping name of God, the
Creator, had made. He said to the woman, did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden?
And immediately we're brought face -to -face with questions like this. We can't blame our environment for our sin.
We can't blame heredity for our sin. They're in the garden. This is perfection.
This is Edenic. And now we have a talking snake. This is a crafty snake, friends.
This is a literal snake. A literal serpent. Later, God in chapter 3, verse 14, judges the literal snake.
This is a real snake that talks. This is a snake that is possessed by Satan.
Do I believe in demonic possession? The answer is yes. Do I believe in satanic possession? Yes, right here.
Snake possessed by Satan himself. A literal creature. A real snake.
And too often I notice, even as I read this week, people go to Genesis chapter 3 and they immediately start saying, well, why do snakes travel on their stomachs?
Why is nakedness a problem? Why do people have snake phobias? One -third of all people in the
U .S. have snake phobia. Ophidiophobia. Why do people have that? And we start getting off track.
We start spiraling into ophidiophobia stuff. By the way, I did find out this week, according to National Geographic News, that the fear of snakes is rooted in evolution.
Just wanted you to know that. Because if you weren't afraid of snakes, they'd bite you and you'd die, so eventually,
I guess our feet figured that out and told our brain and we changed. The issue is not should we be pre -wired against snakes and have snake phobia.
The issue is sin. We're not to be distracted from the fall.
Sin entering into the universe. This beast is being used by Satan.
It's a real serpent and he's cunning, Satan is. Satan uses this instrument, the snake, to bring in sin and deception.
Sin, the interloper in the garden, the stranger. Now, if I were to write this,
I would say, I'd have Satan show up and say, I am a screaming, rabid maniac who hates
God, and I'm going to make you hate Him too. But notice the strategy. Notice the cunning.
Notice the wiles of Satan. We should expect craftiness.
The serpent's crafty combined with Satan's craftiness. And look at what he says.
Did God actually say, you shall not eat of the tree, of any tree in the garden?
There's nothing special about this tree. Certainly, it's not a metaphor for sexual intimacy.
It's not a metaphor of anything else. It's just a tree. By the way, lots of people say it's an apple.
Don't eat of this apple. How do we get this apple into the story? Well, the answer is the
Latin word malum, apple, sounds like the Latin word malus, evil. It's just fruit.
And you know, maybe Eve saw this, and she just thought in the garden, there's maybe some good angel, and he's talking.
Some people say, Satan was kind of throwing his voice. He was a ventriloquist.
And there was a snake over there, and Satan was throwing his voice, kind of like Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy, or Sherry Lewis in Lamb Chop.
I mean, I don't think those really work out too well. By the way, ventriloquism started off not as entertainment, like in the 1700s and 1800s, but it started off when you would hear a noise in your stomach, you would think that was some dead person talking, and then the people would interpret your stomach's growling, like they did with Apollo and Delphi, and then they would translate or interpret the sounds, and so you could speak to the dead through the stomach growling.
Just thought I'd throw that in there. Ventriloquist means vent or belly or loci to speak, so gastromancy was belly talking.
But this was a real serpent talking, demonically, satanically.
You say, well, that's weird. It's no weirder than Balaam's donkey talking, is it? It's no weirder when demons possess a man, and the man says, my name is
Legion, for we are many. We shouldn't be that surprised. And now
Satan comes over, and he's going to talk about God in the third person. It's going to be a comparative religions class.
It's going to be a discussion about God with his, Satan, as it were, the attitude of having his slippers on and a robe and a pipe sitting by a fire.
Let's just talk about God. I believe in God. Satan is going to come across as showing.
Let's just have a little religious conversation. Has God really said, as one lexicon translates it, is it really that he said that?
Is it really true you shouldn't eat of this particular tree? Satan wants
Eve to consider this restriction. He wants her to consider that there's someone greater than she is, with more authority, with more power, and she's under another, and he restricts.
It's not even a complete sentence, verse 1. Satan is cut off by Eve. It's an incomplete sentence in Hebrew.
Translated maybe like this, even though God has said you shouldn't eat of the trees of the garden, surely
God isn't going to limit you. Now, the careful Bible student is going to notice what?
What did he say? What did he leave out here? He said to the woman, did God? You look at Genesis chapter 3, and it is
Lord God, just like earlier in the verse. Lord God, Lord God, Lord God, Lord God.
The covenant -keeping name of Yahweh, tied with the word God, Elohim, the Creator.
And this is how God is referred to by the narrator Moses every single time until Satan just now calls him
God. Not Elohim, Yahweh, but just God. Let's have a little seminar about God.
It's kind of like the original Jesus seminar, for those of you who haven't lost your marbles. Only the people that know the story.
This is just like people today. Just like our contemporary, mainstream, liberal theologians.
They don't say outright, forcefully, initially, there's no
God, you can't believe in His word. It doesn't start off that way. It starts off satanically, just like Satan did here in the garden.
S. Lewis Johnson describes it this way. Can it be that God has really created you too, and He does not allow you to eat up all of the trees of the garden?
Has He withheld something from you? Can a loving God really withhold things from His creatures?
Think of it. A creature of this great God you're talking about, restrained from any tree in the whole garden.
And you're going to see just shortly here in the next verse, she's starting to teeter -totter, she's starting to waver, she's starting to wonder, she's starting to question.
Satan's adding to the words of God. We'll soon find out, just like every cult tries to do.
Do you know, I've been in this garden for a long time, Eve, and I've got some news.
Pray tell, is this news true? Could God be restricting you? God has exceptions.
It must be mistaken. And Eve is falling for Satan's trap, questioning
God. Is God good? Is God reasonable? Can God's laws be so confining?
It reminds me of Jesus' words in John 8. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire.
He, the devil, was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.
When he, Satan, speaks, he speaks his native language, as one translation says, for he's a liar and the father of lies.
2 Corinthians 11 says, But I'm afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. That's why some think
Eve just thought he was another angel of light. Satan goes right for her mind.
Did God really say these things? Question, where's Adam? Where's Adam?
Verse 2, The woman said to the serpent, By the way,
Eve now is functioning as the religious instructor, the religious authority.
The woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but I'm going to have to admit that I'm restricted by another.
I'm kind of entertaining the idea that maybe the restriction is too severe. Maybe God's a little too harsh.
But I feel the restriction, and maybe I should even try to interpret something and defend my position as one who's being restricted.
You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.
Eve interrupts Satan and says these things, but she should have said this, something similar thousands of years later, when
Jesus said, Get thee behind Me, Satan. That's what she should have said.
And now she's starting to try to defend God. She's trying to defend how she should be content to live within the constrictions and restrictions of God.
And the issue, the core issue, is always unbelief. Do you believe God's Word?
Or do you believe Satan's Word? People say sin is lawlessness. That is true. But the initial root of sin is always unbelief, which leads to lawlessness, which spirals into immorality.
The basic root of all sin, market friends, is unbelief.
I don't believe God, and in this particular case, I'm believing Satan instead. Jesus said in John 16, concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me.
Paul said in Romans 14, For whatever does not proceed from faith is what?
Sin. The root cause of sin is always unbelief, which leads to immorality, which leads to lawlessness, rather, spiraling into immorality.
What you told me, Satan, doesn't match up to Scripture. I reject it.
That's what should have happened. I'm not going to accept it. I'm not going to listen. You ever see a kid put their fingers in their ears?
La, la, la, la, la. When we had TV, I mean, we have a TV monitor now, but without the commercials, but that was a lot of, okay, heads down.
She's not believing in God's Word. She's not trusting God's Word. Unbelief is the root of all sin.
Martin Luther said, We cannot do any greater despot to our Lord God than by unbelief, for by it we make
God a devil. And again, on the flip side, we cannot do
Him any greater honor than by faith when we regard Him as Savior. Therefore, we cannot abide a doubting heart like the
Turk who doubts, or the monk who in despair runs to a monastery and says,
Oh, how hot is hell! I will therefore do good works to placate God. But by good works, we do not become
Christian, but we remain a heathen. Again, unbelief is the chief sin and source of all other sins.
Mark it in Genesis 3. Verse 4, the threat's hollow.
I think it might just be a theory. Interesting hypothesis, Eve. The serpent said to the woman,
You shall not surely die. It's a hollow threat.
It's an idle threat. It's theory only. Or maybe God's motive's bad and He's just giving you lip service.
Just a threat. And actually, one Jewish writer says that as he said this,
Satan pushes Eve into the tree. She touches it. And then he says, You're still alive.
Therefore, it's safe to eat. Literally, you shall not dying die.
You think you're going to die, but you're made to believe you're going to die, but you better question it.
Isn't this Satan's way? Question. Doubt. Deny.
Over and over and over. That is the Satanic logical reasoning.
You're not going to die. God's not good. Sin's not bad. Trust me.
Believe me. Why doesn't God want you to have it? I mean, the restriction of another.
How many reasons does Satan have to give to Eve to disobey God? You shall not surely die.
By the way, go to Genesis 5. There's lots to learn from genealogies.
If you just skip over genealogies, you miss some great stuff. Genesis 5, remember
Satan's words, you shall not surely die. Verse 5,
Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.
Verse 8, Thus all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died.
Verse 11, Thus all the days of Enos were 905 years, and he died.
Verse 14, Thus all the days of Canaan were 910 years, and he died.
Verse 17, The days of Mahallel were 895 years, and he died.
Jared verse 20, and he died. Methuselah verse 27, and he died.
Lamech verse 31, and he died. You're surely not going to die, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died.
That's right, and he died. Satan sees the opportunity, and now he's going full force.
First it was questioning earlier, he sees his opening, and now he goes headlong. Direct contradiction of God's Word.
This is the first lie in the Bible. A direct assault on the Word of God.
It's a strong Hebrew negative. There's no possible way you're going to die. You're not going to die.
As one writer said, and of course ultimately it will involve death,
Theocide, because it will be necessary for the Son of God to come, and to die upon the cross at Calvary, in order that the race may be saved through the work of our
Lord Jesus Christ. It's fascinating to me because the first lie in all the
Bible is about divine judgment. We don't want those fire and brimstone preachers.
We don't want those preachers talking about judgment all the time, and sin, and death, and hell, and the fire and brimstone.
Denying the judgment of God. The first lie in the
Bible, denying death, denying physical death, denying spiritual death, denying eternal death, eternal judgment.
I teach preaching classes on occasion, and I was struck when a writer said, No homiletics professor in any theological seminary of which
I am aware, ever tells his students to preach hellfire and damnation. It's unpopular today.
Don't preach it. Verse 5 of Genesis chapter 3.
Let's go back to Genesis chapter 3. As we're reading this devastating account,
I hope in the back of your mind you're thinking, If Ruth needed a physical Redeemer, how much more do
I need a spiritual Redeemer? How much more does mankind need an umpire, an arbiter, a mediator, a go -between?
You know, God's holding out in you. Verse 5. For God knows, basically you're going to be equal with God if you take this, and He doesn't want to have any rivals.
If you're going to be like God, then maybe you can retire Him from service. You're going to learn His secrets.
God knows, and again, not Lord God, not Lord God, not Lord God, but God. For God knows, it's kind of like a third person discussion.
He knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened. And you'll be like God, knowing good and evil.
He wants to forbid you being like Him. Who knows what she's thinking?
Hey, God can create worlds. If I would eat, I could create worlds. Just run over there and eat that thing so you can become independent of this restrainer.
You need to be like God. By the way, doesn't this sound like Mormonism and other New Age religions, like the
New Age movement? You can be like God. Sounds like Isaiah 14 language as well.
I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will be like the
Most High. Jewish rabbis would say that nothing but malice had prompted
God's command. This is what Satan is saying to Eve, according to the rabbis. Because as soon as you eat of it, you'll be like God.
As He creates and destroys worlds, so will you have the power to create and destroy. As He does kill and revive, so you have the power to kill and revive.
God Himself ate first of the tree, and then He created the world, and now
He forbids you to eat of it lest you create other worlds. He doesn't want you to learn
His little tricks. Eve is listening. It is not true that if you know the knowledge of good and evil, that's what makes
God, God. That's another lie. It's a lie that God is jealous of His knowledge.
Everywhere, lie after lie after lie. And He's attacking Eve. I have a question for you.
Where is Adam? I'm sorry to tell you, the answer is found in verse 6.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, when the woman believed the words of Satan, when the woman did not defend
God's honor, and it was a delight to the eyes, the text says, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
And she also gave some to her husband. Mark these four English words the whole time.
Who was with her? He was present during the entire time.
He has not opened his mouth. Who was with her? Headship gone, leadership gone, authority gone.
Who was with her? And then with these three ominous words, as Young calls them, stark alone words standing out, the
Hebrew text is, she ate, comma, he ate. She ate, he ate.
Adam was with her the whole time. No wonder Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2 of Adam's deliberate and heinous sin as federal head.
It was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived fell into transgression.
Adam passively watched this whole thing go down, and Eve was deceived.
Adam wasn't deceived, and his sin was worse for lots of reasons. One, he's the federal head. Two, he's the leader, but he knew better and still did it.
As one man said, Eve followed the snake, Adam followed Eve, and no one followed the
Lord. She ate it.
I don't see her face turning all weird. I'll eat it. She ate it.
She didn't fall down dead. She ate it. Nothing happened to her.
Robert Raymond writes, having abdicated his protective headship over her, he went along with her in her transgression and permitted her to disobey
God, thus transgressing himself. In sum, when Eve fell, Adam also fell.
Indeed, they had already fallen. And of course we know there was sin that happened before the actual bite.
The volition inside had already gone against God. Adam, you should have believed
God. You should have reasoned. Derek Kidner said, this act, so simple the act, so hard its undoing.
And because of Adam's sin, the race plunged into depravity. Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin.
And in this way death came to all men, because all sinned. Challenging God's Word in front of Adam and he makes no defense.
He doesn't stick up for the honor of God. I think this is kind of a good takeaway for some of you here, for all of us here.
God's honor is at stake, and then we're silent? May it never be. There's important lessons for us.
Take God at His Word. Don't become your own authority determining for yourself what is right and wrong.
Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes this awful account. Our first parents being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit.
This their sin, God was pleased according to His wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.
By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God and became so dead in sin and wholly defiled in all their parts and faculties of soul and body.
How sad. It makes me think, I need a
Redeemer. We need redemption. Verse 7.
Notice the first word. Their eyes weren't both open when Eve ate. She wasn't the federal head.
She wasn't the covenant head of all this. Mark it well. Then after Adam ate, religion spawned.
Man -made religion. People trying to hide their sins and be religious before God and acceptable by God's eyes through education, through baptism, through religion, self -righteousness.
Then both of their eyes were open. They knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
I've been told that fig leaves make poor coverings. I've been told that fig leaves are itchy and scratchy.
What a great picture. What an awful picture of the human inadequacy to try to deal with your own sin.
They heard the sound of, isn't this interesting? Now we go back to the Lord God. Because this is
Moses talking. This is the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, inspiring Moses, breathing these words into Moses to write again.
Satan wants to talk about God as some third person, kind of like a discussion around the fireplace and now it's back to the
Lord God. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden, in the cool of the day.
And literally, here's how the Hebrew reads, the man hid himself and the woman herself.
No longer together, now every man for themselves. Communion broken with God vertically and with each other horizontally.
They hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Alienation from God, alienation between each other. And they're hiding themselves.
They're not strolling down the runway, the fashion runway before God showing off their fig leaf attire.
They're ashamed. They're embarrassed. They realize these fig leaf coverings like short sheeting a bed.
Now here's the fascinating thing. It's like the grace of God in Scripture starts in chapter 3, verse 8 and never ends.
All the way till even today we're reading in Revelation 21. The grace of God just extends and extends and extends.
Who's the one seeking? Who's the one searching? Who's the one taking the initiative to seek and save those who are lost?
Who is that? The love of God. He's not going to abandon these creatures.
They didn't love Him back. They failed to do His will. They disobeyed. They didn't believe. But God is gracious and He takes the initiative.
Verse 9, But the Lord God called to the man, said to him,
Where are you? He said, I heard the sound of you in the garden.
I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. Who told you that you were naked?
Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The woman you gave me, the woman you gave to be with me, she gave me of the fruit and I ate.
It's not good for a man to be alone. I'm going to give this man a woman to be his helper.
And now Adam says, That good gift that you gave me was anything but good. You want to know what my source of trouble is?
That woman that you gave me. It's your fault, God. Blaming God. The writer says,
Sin makes man a coward and an evader. Will Rogers, the theologian, said,
That American history could be divided into two eras. The era of the passing of the buffalo and the era of the passing of the buck.
You gave me this woman. She's my problem. Then the Lord God said to the woman, The Lord God said to the woman,
What is this that you have done? And the woman said, She's a quick learner. The serpent deceived me.
She learned quickly from her husband. That old preacher who said, Adam blamed
Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. And the serpent hadn't a leg to stand on.
We just need a little... The sinfulness of sin.
People say, Like Joel Osteen, blasphemously talking. You know what?
We all know we're sinful. We don't need to talk about that anymore. I don't have to talk about sin, because everybody knows they're a sinner.
Well, the Bible talks a lot about sin. Why? For many reasons. But one is, because when you realize how sinfully sinful you are, and you can't extricate yourself from your sin, and you need a
Redeemer, you need a mediator, you need an umpire, you need an arbiter, you need the God -man to cloak himself with humanity, to live the life you were supposed to live.
Adam tried and failed. Israel tried and failed. You tried and failed. I tried and failed. Jesus lives the perfect life, because once you see sin, then you realize the
Savior, and Savior is so much sweeter when I realize the depths of sin.
If you're a slave, and then you're free, D .L.
Moody said, Looking at the wound of sin will never save anyone. What you must do is look at the remedy.
But friends, I would remind you that when you see the wound of sin, the remedy becomes sweeter.
And it's going to have to take the death of Jesus to kill sin. It says in verse 14, we need to wrap this up,
The Lord God said to the serpent, the judgment's on the serpent. Why do I think it's a literal serpent?
Here's the serpent's judgment. Because you have done this, cursed are you above all the livestock, and above all beasts of the field.
On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. And then we have in verse 15, called the first gospel, the proto -gospel.
I, we have God speaking to Satan, will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.
A woman's offspring, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
The Messiah is going to kill you and crush you out. You're going to wound him, but he's going to kill you.
Jesus is the seed of that woman. Please turn to Job, and we're going to wrap it up with just these verses in Job.
And I think we'll come to Genesis 3 next week as well, so we can finish up this passage. I don't want to leave anything.
Job chapter 9 please. And I want to remind you that even though our sin is great, we have a mediator.
We have a go -between. We have someone, I don't know if you've ever been in trouble with the law, but you need a good lawyer.
The first person you want to call, I need a good lawyer to defend my case. Job knew he needed a lawyer.
I won't read every verse, but a few. Job 9 .1, Then Job answered and said, Truly I know that it is so, but how can a man be in the right before God?
If one wished to contend with Him, one could not answer Him once in a thousand times. If you go to the dock, if you go to the bar of justice and stand before the
Judge of the Universe, the Holy God, how can you stand before Him? Don't you need someone to go between, to step in front of, to intercept, to advocate for you?
To be a lawyer for you? That's what Job is saying. Verse 14, How then can I answer Him? Choosing my words with Him?
Like am I just going to have a word game and I can just be a good speaker to get out of my trouble? Though I'm in the right,
I cannot answer Him. I must appeal for mercy to my accuser. If I summoned Him and He answered me,
I would not believe that He was listening to my voice. Verse 20, Though I am in the right, my own mouth would condemn me.
Though I am blameless, compared to His friends, He would prove me perverse. I am blameless.
I regard not myself. I loathe my life. Verse 30, If I wash myself with snow and cleanse my hands with lyre, if I put fig leaves on, yet you will plunge me into the pit and my own clothes will abhor me.
For He is not a man as I am that I might answer Him that we should come together to trial.
There is no arbiter. Or maybe a better translation, would that there were an arbiter between us who might lay
His hand on both of us. That's what we need. We need a go -between.
We need an arbiter. Sin is so bad, who's going to be the defense lawyer? And that's why, with wonder and amazement, with the gracious love of God, it says in 1
Timothy, there is one God and there is one mediator between God and man.
Not the Jew, but the man Christ Jesus who gave
Himself as a ransom for all. If you're a Christian, you stand before God with an umpire, with an arbiter, with a defense lawyer, with an advocate.
Aren't you glad? Can you imagine? Let's put it this way. Because our sin was so great, it took the works of Christ Jesus to undo that.
But it was such a great death of Christ, such a great life of Christ, that when you get to heaven, you will be no more righteous than you are today.
You cannot get any more righteous because you are in Christ Jesus. You have union with Him and God sees you in the
Beloved. You will not gain any righteousness in Christ. Oh, your positional righteousness will be there.
I'm talking about your practical righteousness, but I'm talking about your positional righteousness.
What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. Let's pray.
Father in heaven, I thank You that even though our sins are great, we have a
Redeemer, Christ Jesus, who paid the penalty for our sins, destroying
Satan's authority over us. Thank You for that. Thank You that we are children of the living
God. Thank You that through death, as the writer of Hebrews says, Jesus might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil.
We're thankful that Jesus is a risen Savior and that we have the hope of heaven. Father, help us to now, as Christian people, hate sin because we know the very origins of it.