FBC Morning Light – January 2, 2023

Well, a good morning to you and a happy new year, starting off not only a new week today, but starting a new year.

So here it is, January 2nd, and we have already begun a new

Bible reading plan for this coming year. The last one we used was a two -year plan that would take us through the

Bible in two years' time, and the one we've chosen for the church to follow this year is a one -year plan, and it works like this.

On Monday through Friday, you read two chapters from the

Old Testament, one chapter from the New Testament, and a psalm or a portion of a psalm as well.

And then on the weekends, on Saturday and Sunday, you read just two chapters from the

Old Testament on each day. So on the weekends, there's no New Testament passage, and there's no psalm passage.

I suppose that gives you an opportunity to kind of catch up in case you fell behind at some point during the course of the week.

So yesterday in our Bible reading plan, we started with Genesis 1 and 2, and today we read

Genesis 3 and 4, Matthew 1, and Psalm 1. Now, if you don't attend

Faith Baptist Church and you don't have that Bible reading plan, there's a couple things you can do. One of them is the plan is available as a download from the

Faith Baptist Bible College website. There's a resources tab, and you can download it there.

And you can also, every day in these broadcasts, in the notes at the bottom, whether it's on Facebook or YouTube or the church website, however you view this, even in the emails

I send out with links attached to the devotionals, however you view, I also include the readings for the day.

So maybe that can be helpful as well. Well, today I want to focus on just a couple of ideas in Genesis chapter 3.

Of course, this is the record of the fall of humanity, the fall of man. As Eve is tempted in the garden, she takes the fruit, and then

Adam joins in with her, and he takes the fruit, and the whole human race is therefore plunged into depravity.

But there are two tendencies that come out in this passage. There's a lot of things, oh, so much that we can learn from these few verses in Genesis 3.

But I just want to highlight two tendencies of the human heart, even today. One of them is seen in this interaction between Eve and the serpent.

And when the serpent initially comes to her, he introduces this question of her and says,

Has God indeed said you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? In other words, didn't

God say you can't eat of any of the trees in the garden? And the woman replies and says, We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden...

Now remember, that's the one where God had told Adam, Don't eat of that particular tree.

Don't eat the fruit of that particular tree. And the day that you eat the fruit of that tree, you will die.

So don't eat of it. So that was the command. It goes back to chapter 2 and verse 17, where the

Lord told Adam, Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. From the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

So that was the command. Now look at how Eve phrases that restriction.

She says, We can eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, 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, lest you die.

Now did God say anything about touching it? No, not at all. God just said, Don't eat it.

So theoretically, they could go touch it all they wanted to touch it, but they couldn't partake, they couldn't eat of that fruit.

So I think that that kind of highlights one of the tendencies that we have in relationship to God's law.

God has established His law, we think of the moral law in the Decalogue, the

Ten Commandments, and there are many things in the Bible that God tells us that we have to do, that we must do to obey

Him, things that we must not do in order to obey Him. Some of those things are pretty clear.

You shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not commit adultery, and so forth.

But what we have a tendency to do is, I like to use the illustration this way, there is this cliff, and you can walk along the edge of the cliff, but if you disobey this command, you're walking over the edge of the cliff.

So the command that God gives is like a fence, a barrier at the top of that cliff to keep us from falling off the cliff.

We don't want to do that. God doesn't want us to do that. So He says, don't steal. There's the command.

But one of our tendencies is to add to God's law, and to make it more restrictive than God made it, and with good motive.

I wonder if Adam and Eve didn't have a conversation between the two of them, and Adam had to tell

Eve, we're not to eat of that tree, so listen, don't even touch it, don't even go near it.

Now, did they have that conversation? I don't particularly know, but you can imagine how that takes place.

I mean, it happens to us all the time, right? This is the law, and in order to not break the law, then it'd be safer if you just don't even do this.

You move the fence back a little bit. What that does is it makes

God more harsh than He seems to be to the person who's concerned about having to follow rules.

It tends to put a mindset in our heads that we're just really strained, we're restrained, we're restricted, and we're bound by chains and fetters, and that's exactly what

Satan, the wicked one, wanted to convince Eve.

That God is just an ogre, He's just cruel, He's mean, He's just trying to restrict your freedom, you're not going to die, you're not going to die.

That's one of the tendencies, to move the fences back when God hasn't done so.

Another tendency comes out after Adam and Eve both partook of the fruit,

God comes and confronts them with that, and how did they respond? What did they respond?

God says to Adam, did you eat of the fruit? And the man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.

What's Adam doing? He does what we're so prone to do. He's shifting the blame to somebody else, to try to make it make him less guilty.

Eve does the same thing. The Lord turns to Eve and says, what is this you have done?

Eve says, the serpent deceived me, and I ate. The blame is very evident.

Both Adam and Eve are clearly guilty, they knew very clearly what God's law was – don't eat the fruit.

And they ate the fruit. When God came to Adam and said, have you eaten from the tree? Then Adam should have simply hung his head and said, yeah,

I did. Yeah, I did. What about you, Eve? Yeah, I did, admitting the guilt.

But we are so programmed to not want to admit guilt, that we look for somebody else to blame.

Let's avoid both of these tendencies. Let's not make

God's law to be any more strict than it is. I'm not saying that it's not wise sometimes for our own personal edification, our own personal help, to put some boundaries in areas that God hasn't prescribed, but we do that for ourselves personally.

We don't say, God told me to build this fence. This is God's law. This fence is

God's law. No, we don't want to do that. When we are guilty, we don't want to shift the blame to somebody else.

Accept our responsibility for these things. Let's ask

God to help us in these things. Father, we thank you for this new year that you've given us. We realize that both of these tendencies we see in Genesis 3 are just part of our human heart.

I pray that you would deliver us from them. I pray that we would see that those laws that you put into place are for our benefit, for our own good, and they are expressions of your love and your grace and your kindness.

They're not designed to burden us and weigh us down and overly restrict us.

Father, I pray, when we have violated your word, when we have broken your law, when we are guilty of sin, help us to take personal responsibility for that, and not to look for somebody else or something else to blame.

We pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, again, happy new year.

I hope your new year and your new week gets off to a great start, and may the Lord bless you in it.