Original Sin

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You can take out your Bibles, and while we stand, we'll turn to the third chapter of Genesis.
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The title of today's message is simply Original Sin.
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Original Sin, and we're going to be looking at Genesis 3, verses 14 to 19.
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The Lord said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field.
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On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
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I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.
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He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
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To the woman, he said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing.
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In pain you shall bring forth children.
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Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.
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And to Adam, he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
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Cursed is the ground because of you.
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In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
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Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field.
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By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I pray now that as we seek to understand it better, and seek to understand the doctrine of original sin, I pray that you would keep me from error.
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For Lord, I know my capacity for failure, and I know my capacity for error, and I pray that you would keep me from it for the sake of your name, for the sake of my conscience, and for the sake of my hearers.
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And Father, ultimately, I pray that your Holy Spirit would speak, that he would be the one who teaches today.
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For Lord, we will learn nothing if not for the work of the Spirit.
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And I pray, Lord, that this message would not only draw believers to a closer and better understanding of what the Bible says, but also, Lord, if there are those here who are not in Christ, that it would bring a conviction which would lead to a conversion, which is the work of your Spirit alone.
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Father, we know that we cannot manipulate conversion, so we trust you with all of that.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
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Well, I want to again remind everyone that we are continuing this morning our study of the Protestant Reformation.
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We began this series many, many months ago looking at the history of the Reformation because we are building up to the 500th anniversary, which will be coming this month.
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It's October.
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October 31st is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, the day that Martin Luther nailed the 95 theses to the wall of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
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And we began a history lesson, but now it's turned into a study of a doctrinal confession.
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We've chosen the 1646 First London Baptist Confession of Faith as our confession to study.
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And that, as some of you may remember who have been here, that is a confession of seven individual congregations in England that came together for the purpose of identifying themselves as both being Baptists, but also being Orthodox in their faith, because the Anabaptists had become known as being somewhat radical, being very, at some point, very dangerous.
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One, as we mentioned in our history lesson, having taken over a whole town, tried to create a theocracy and introduce all kinds of strange doctrines.
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And so the Baptists of England wanted to separate themselves and make themselves distinct from the Anabaptists, while at the same time demonstrating that they did believe, in fact, in Believer's Baptism, and that was one of the points that helped them identify who they were, and thus they were called Baptists.
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And we've looked now at three articles.
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The last three weeks we looked at three articles.
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The first article dealt with the nature of God.
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The second article dealt with the consistency of the doctrine of the Trinity.
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And the third article we looked at last week was on the sovereignty and providence of God.
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Well, this week we're going to be looking at the fourth article, and if you open up your, or turn your folder over, your worship folder, you see on the back of it, you'll see an outline of this article.
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And this article picks up where the last one left off.
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Article 3 says that God is sovereign, He is providentially guiding all things for His glory, and He is in control of all things, and yet He is not the author of sin.
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And this is what the Bible teaches, but the confession is seeking to make the point that while God has control over everything, sin is not to be laid, its responsibility is not to be laid at the feet of God, but at the feet of man.
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Because it is man who rebelled against God.
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And it is Satan himself, also, who was the original rebel against the Lord.
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And so the confession makes the point that God is not the chargeable author of sin, and then in the very next article goes about making the case about who is.
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And so that is where we are today.
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And we're going to read the confession together.
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If you have your folders, you can turn and look with me.
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It says in Article 4, In the beginning God made all things very good, created man after his own image, filled with all meat, perfection of nature, and free from all sin.
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But long he abode not in this honor.
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Satan, using the subtlety of the serpent to seduce first Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who without any compulsion in eating the forbidden fruit, transgressed the command of God, and fell, whereby death came upon all his posterity.
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Who now are conceived in sin, and by nature the children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subject of death and other miseries in this world, and forever, unless the Lord Jesus Christ set them free.
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That is the confession.
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And we know, as we've said, that's not the Word of God, but that is a summary of what the Word of God teaches.
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That's what a confession is.
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This is not the Bible.
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But the reason why we're studying it is we're doing this study of doctrine, and this is a summary of what the Bible teaches.
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So today we're going to be outlining this summary, and learning what it's teaching.
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One of the most common objections, and I don't know how many of you guys speak to atheists, or talk to atheists, or befriend people who don't believe the same as you, but if you've never talked to somebody who doesn't believe the Bible, or if you don't engage with people like that, you may not realize this, but one of the most common objections that atheists use against the belief in the Bible, or the belief in God, is that the world is filled with pain and suffering.
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It's actually an objection that was put forth recently by the famed scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
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If you've never heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's very famous.
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He's sort of taken up where Carl Sagan left off with the study of the cosmos, and his goal has been to try to introduce young people to the scientific method, and trying to prove that the scientific method can answer the mysteries of the cosmos, as it were.
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And Neil deGrasse Tyson was interviewed recently by some type of news show, and he was being asked, well, what do you think about people who believe in God? It's clear that you don't believe in God, but what do you think about people who believe in God? And he said, well, you know, he gave the typical, well, I respect people of faith.
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That's nice.
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But then he goes on to say, But I have a hard time understanding a belief in God when I look around the world, and I see so much pain.
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And I see so many people who are going hungry, and so many people who are going without the necessities of life, and I see so much pain and suffering and darkness in the world, I have a hard time justifying a belief in a deity.
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This was deGrasse.
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I'm paraphrasing his statement, but that's pretty close to what he said.
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And this is not something he invented.
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That is not a new objection.
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The objection is really very, very old.
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And sometimes it's worded like this.
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People will say, well, if God is all good, he can't be all powerful.
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And if he's all powerful, he can't be all good.
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Because if God were both all good and all powerful, then he wouldn't allow bad to happen.
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So either he's not all good, and he's powerful enough to stop it, and he doesn't.
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Or he's not all powerful, and he's just not powerful enough to stop it.
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So this is the philosophy of God can't be good and powerful at the same time, or all good and all powerful.
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Because if he were, there'd be no bad in the world.
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Yet this objection ignores the fact that the Bible clearly addresses this issue.
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In fact, it addresses this question in its earliest chapters.
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The Bible teaches that God created the world very good.
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Not just good, but it says very good.
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Over and over, he says, it was good, it was good.
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He created this, and it was good.
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He created that, and it was good.
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He created the world, and it was good.
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In Genesis 1.31, it says, And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
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But the story doesn't end there.
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Because that's just the end of the first chapter of the book.
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The story doesn't even come close to ending there.
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That's the beginning.
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Because this world didn't stay good.
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The world we live in, and I hope this isn't a surprise to any of you, but you don't live in God's good world anymore.
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Let me say that again.
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Make sure you're awake.
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You do not live in God's good world anymore.
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And sometimes people don't like to hear that because they say, Well, we live in a world of beauty.
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Just go out and look at the world around us.
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It's so beautiful.
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There's waterfalls, and there's beautiful trees and mountains.
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But the reality is, even with all the beauty of the world around us, it's actually ugly compared to the way God created it.
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Some of what we see as beauty is actually scars from the past.
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For instance, how many of you have ever been to the Grand Canyon? You don't have to necessarily raise your hand, but we've all seen it on the television or in books.
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You realize the Grand Canyon, in all of its beauty, is a scar on the face of the world.
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And while we can look at it now and say, Yes, that's a thing of massive amazement, it's actually likely a remnant of the flood, which was God's judgment on the sin of man.
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So when we look at the beauty of the Grand Canyon, we say, Yeah, it's beautiful, but it's a beautiful scar.
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And it remains as the leftover from one of the most devastating catastrophes in human history brought about by sin.
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We no longer live in a good world.
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We live in a world that's influenced, corrupted, and overseen by evil.
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People ask me sometimes, Are you a conspiracy theorist? Let me say this.
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I'm not a conspiracy theorist like the movies and TV, but I believe there's a conspiracy because I believe in the devil.
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So I believe that there is conspiracy all the time because there's always an evil force in the background.
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There's always the work of the devil seeking to undo the work of God.
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So while I don't necessarily think that there is necessarily a group of guys in a room somewhere who's leading everything, maybe there is, I don't know, but I'm saying, when you talk about conspiracy, yes, there is evil in this world.
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And it's the result of the fall.
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I want you to think about what happened right after sin entered the world.
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Because we don't know what the world was like before.
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And I've heard people try to describe Eden and the Edenic state.
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There's no way that we can really understand the Edenic state.
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There's no way to really understand what it was like before evil entered the world.
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But when evil entered the world, we do know some things that happened.
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One man felt shame for the first time.
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You know what he did as soon as he sinned? He covered himself.
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He covered himself because for the first time, the Bible says he realized he was naked and he felt shame.
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And so he covered himself.
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And he hid from God.
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When he heard that God was there, he ran and he hid.
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As if you can really hide from the Almighty.
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People are still trying to do that today.
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We hide our sins.
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We keep them in our closets or tucked away where no one else can see, thinking we're hiding from God.
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We're not.
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And that's the first thing that man did.
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He felt shame, so he hid from God.
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And then he felt indignation.
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He blamed his sin.
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Not only did he feel shame, but then he wanted someone to blame it on.
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And everybody thinks that Adam blamed Eve.
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But he really didn't.
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If you read what Adam said, he said, The woman that thou hast given me.
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Who's he blaming? He's blaming God.
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I wouldn't have done this if you hadn't have given me that woman.
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Okay, okay.
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So he looks at God and he points his finger at God.
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And he said, If you hadn't have given me that woman, I wouldn't have done that.
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So it's all your fault.
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By the way, how long do you think that lasted? I mean, how long do you think God entertained that notion? Not even for a second.
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But then he felt fear.
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He never felt these things before.
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He never felt shame until sin came.
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He never felt anger and indignation and the desire to blame until sin came.
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And now he feels fear because he's under the condemnation of God.
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He probably thinks at that moment death is imminent.
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Because what did God say? On the day that thou shalt eat of it, you shall surely die.
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He didn't even really understand what death was, other than it's the opposite of life.
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And some people have had qualms with the Scripture.
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They said, Well, he didn't die that day, so God's a liar.
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But he did die that day.
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Spiritually, Adam was a corpse in that moment.
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There was death.
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And he brought death on himself because he would eventually physically die.
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And so too would all his posterity.
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That's all of us.
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And we would be dead spiritually as well.
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So there's this tremendous effect that happened as a result of sin.
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And when we read this morning, we read through verses 14-19 of Genesis 3, we see the curse that came as a result of the fall.
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First it begins with God cursing Satan.
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And then he promises, verse 15, by the way, is called the Proto-Evangelium, or the first reference to the Gospel.
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Because it references God saying that there's coming a seed of the woman who is going to stomp the head of the serpent, who's going to crush his head.
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And later we know that that's a veiled reference to the work of Jesus Christ, the seed of Abraham, the seed of the woman who was Jesus.
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But so we see that promise there in line with the curse.
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There's the curse to the serpent, but he's going to be destroyed one day by the work of Jesus.
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Then to the woman, there's not only the pain of childbirth, but also there's going to be this position with her husband where they're going to be fighting over authority, which still continues to this day.
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It's called the battle of the sexes.
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Where she'll fight for that authority, but he'll reign over her with his strength.
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And they'll never have that peace that they had prior to the fall.
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There'll always be some tension there.
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And the man is not going to have the earth producing for him anymore.
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He's now going to have to work to get the earth to produce.
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And he's going to have to sweat to get the earth to produce what he needs.
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So this is where God brings man.
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He says, this world is no longer what I made.
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The earth is no longer what I created.
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I created a good world, you now live in a cursed world.
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So when you hear someone say, well, I don't believe in God because of all the terrible things in the world.
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Say, why do you think this is the world God created? Why do you think he created it this way? You don't think man had any intervention in this? You don't think man has any responsibility for this? Often times I talk to people, there's great confusion in people's minds about the role of Adam in history.
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I really think this is one of the places where the church has missed the boat.
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And I don't mean the church everywhere, but I think in a lot of churches just like with the whole Noah and the flood thing.
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You go to most churches and you go into the nursery or whatever and Noah's ark looks like a little boat with two or three animal heads sticking out.
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And we used to have one in our nursery years ago.
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I painted it myself, so I can take a little bit of the blame for that.
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But that's the picture we have of Noah.
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But the picture of Noah is much more drastic than that.
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It's much more realistic than that.
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And the same goes for Adam and Eve.
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People think Adam and Eve are a myth.
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People think Adam and Eve are a fictional tale.
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But you realize Adam and Eve are the first two human beings to live.
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God created Adam, He created Eve from Adam.
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And together they represented humankind.
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Adam being the federal head of all the human race.
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And when Adam did what he did, and by the way it's always laid at his feet.
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The Bible says Eve was deceived, Adam was not deceived.
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Adam did what he did willingly.
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And Adam was not tricked.
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He chose to rebel.
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And in doing so, he not only cursed the world, he cursed his progeny, us.
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And again, some people say Adam and Eve never existed.
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You realize if Adam didn't exist and there was no fall, there would be no need for the cross.
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The fall of man represents the need of man.
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The cross represents the fulfilling of that need.
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Some people believe Adam and Eve were a myth.
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Other people believe that Adam and Eve were historical people, but that they didn't have any effect on the rest of humankind.
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That they did their thing, but the rest of humankind does their own thing.
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Neither one of those are biblical truths.
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The Bible teaches that Adam was a literal person.
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He wasn't an evolved monkey.
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And the Bible teaches that they were created innocent.
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In fact, I would argue they were created, in a sense, upright.
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The text of our confession says they were meet, perfect of nature.
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That's simply to say that they didn't have the inclination to sin, but they still did.
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And after their sin in the garden, they were no longer innocent.
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Neither were any of their children.
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Because Adam acted as their representative.
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He was our representative.
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And so now none of us are innocent either.
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Every one of us is born with the taint of Adam's sin.
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And that's the doctrine of original sin, by the way.
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People think original sin is Adam's sin.
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No, the original sin, from a theological perspective, original sin is not Adam's sin, but it's the effect of Adam's sin.
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Original sin is what we're born with.
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We are born sinners.
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We don't become sinners when we sin.
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We sin because we're sinners.
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The Bible teaches that Adam, as the head of the human race, when he sinned, he took man with him.
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He took the whole race with him.
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You say, I don't believe that.
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Turn to Romans 5.
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I want to just demonstrate that I'm not speaking into the air today, or from a point of ignorance, but I want to show you that the Bible teaches this.
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Go into the book of Romans, turn to chapter 5.
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Go to verse 12.
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It says, And that section, I want to go on to verse 15, but that section is simply saying this, that the death that all men experience is a result of the fall.
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The death that all men experience is the result of sin.
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And even if a person has never heard the law of God, they are still subject to it.
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Because the law of God is written in our hearts.
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Romans 2 says that.
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And every man is subject to that law, and thus every man dies.
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And that's what he said.
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Their transgression might not be like Adam.
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They might not have gotten a verbal command from God, but they are still transgressors because of Adam.
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And he goes on to say this in verse 15.
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The free gift is not like the trespass.
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What Jesus did is not like what Adam did.
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Because for if many died through one man's trespass, much more had the grace of God and the free gift of grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.
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And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin.
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For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation.
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What does that say? The judgment following one trespass brought what? Condemnation.
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But the free gift following many trespasses brought justification.
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Adam brings condemnation to the world.
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Christ brings justification to the world.
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Verse 17.
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For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
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Therefore, listen to verse 18.
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As one trespass led to condemnation for all men.
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So one act of righteousness leads to justification in life for all men.
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For as by one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.
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Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
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This is what it's saying.
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It's very simple.
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Adam brings condemnation through his sin.
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And everyone in Adam is condemned.
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You say, well, who's in Adam? Everybody.
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There's no one in this room who is not a descendant of Adam.
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In fact, there's no one in this room who's not a descendant of Noah.
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Because everyone else who wasn't a descendant of Noah died at the flood.
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So Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, those three sons, you're tied, if you joined hands with every one of your ancestors, and they joined hands with the one before them, and he joined hands, somebody's going to be holding hands with Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
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Or Shem, Ham, or Japheth.
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And one of those guys is going to be holding hands with Noah, and Noah could reach back and grab the hand of his ancestors all the way back to Adam.
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We all are in the same family.
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By the way, this is why racism is ridiculous.
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Because there's one race.
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There's different ethnicities, there's different nationalities, there's different skin color because of geographic location, but we're all human beings, we're all one race.
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We all go back to Adam.
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So we look at this, and we say, okay, we're all in Adam.
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So everyone in Adam is condemned, right? In Adam all die.
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1 Corinthians 15, we read that this morning as our call to worship.
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In Adam all die.
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But in Christ, all are made alive.
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And I say, are you in Christ? Because not everyone's in Christ.
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You understand that? When it says, in Adam all die, but in Christ all are made alive, not everyone's in Christ.
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Everyone who is in Christ will be made alive.
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Everyone who is in Christ is alive by the work of the Spirit.
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So this becomes the question of where are you? The Bible calls Jesus the last Adam.
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Do you know that? You know why it calls him the last Adam? Because there won't be another one.
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There's the first Adam who brings condemnation, there's the last Adam who brings justification, and there's no one else.
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You're either in Adam or you're in Jesus.
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If you're in Adam and you're still there, you're condemned.
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But if you're in Jesus, you are saved.
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That's why this doctrine matters.
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That's why the understanding of Genesis 1, 2, 3, all the way to chapter 11, all the way to the end of the book matters.
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But those first 11 chapters which talk about the foundation of the world matters because it helps us to understand why the cross matters.
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So we see Adam or Christ.
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Adam or Christ.
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So we read again the confession, and I just want to outline the confession as we start to draw to a close.
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I want to outline the confession because it tells us the condition of man prior to the fall.
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In the beginning, God made all things very good.
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He created man after his own image, filled with all meat, perfection of nature, and free from all sin.
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If somebody says, why is the world the way it is? Because it's been corrupted.
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God made it good.
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He made men good.
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He made the world good.
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And there's coming a day of restoration.
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But the beginning, God made things good.
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But then there's the fall of mankind.
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And this phrase really gets me.
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When I read this in the confession, I know again it's not Scripture, but sometimes just the way people word things, and the writers of this confession, it says, but long he abode not in this honor.
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We don't know how long he was there.
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I don't know how long Adam and Eve were free from sin.
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I don't know how long it took for them to sin.
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But the Bible doesn't address anything that happened in that period.
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So the confession simply says, long they abode not in that honor.
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Satan, using the subtlety of the serpent to seduce Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who without any compulsion, that again, what I said earlier, he did it without compulsion, and eating the forbidden fruit, transgressed the command of God.
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And you might think to yourself, why eating a piece of fruit? That is so inconsequential.
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And this is what atheists, they make such a big deal about this.
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They say, oh man, God can't curse the whole world just because somebody ate a fruit.
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We don't know what kind of fruit it was.
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Doesn't matter.
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But how could God be so petty? I've heard atheists say that.
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How could God be so petty as to judge the whole world for eating a piece of fruit? Let me just explain something to you very, very simply.
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The condemnation came, not for the degree of the sin, not that it was such a tremendous sin in its act, but the condemnation came because it was rebelling against the command of God.
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They only had one command.
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Don't do this.
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It's the rebellion.
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It's looking God in his face and spitting in his face.
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It doesn't matter if it was a piece of fruit or not.
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It's who you're sinning against that matters.
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Adam and Eve sinned against God, and it says, and fell whereby death came upon all his posterity.
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You want to blame someone for the sin of this world, or for the pain of this world and the suffering of this world, you look no further than ourselves.
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We look no further than our willingness to look God in the face and spit.
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You know, every time we sin against God, we're spitting in His face.
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How many of you would stand for it if somebody came up to you, shoved you into a wall and spit in your face? And that's what we do when we sin against God.
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And then we wonder why the foundations of the world are collapsing.
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And that's why it goes on to say in the third part, "...who now are conceived in sin, by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, subject of death and other miseries in this world, and forever unless the Lord Jesus Christ set them free." That is where we are.
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If we are not in Christ, if Christ has not set you free, you are subject to sin, death, and condemnation.
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So really, today is a reminder.
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There's only two types of people in this world.
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There's only two classifications of people in this world.
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Everybody wants to classify people by race.
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Everybody wants to classify people by nation.
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Everybody wants to classify people by skin color.
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There's really only two classifications in Scripture.
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You are either in Adam or you are in Jesus Christ.
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And if you think about what this part of the confession does, this part of the confession gives us the meta-narrative of history.
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God created all things good.
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That goodness was corrupted by sin.
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God loved the world so much that He sent His Son to deal with that sin.
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And Jesus Christ died on the cross to buy back sinners out of the slave market of sin.
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And everyone who trusts on Him will experience redemption.
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And one day God's good world will be restored.
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And His people will forever get to enjoy His good world.
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This is why Revelation 21, I'm going to end with this.
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The promise of the new heavens.
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Revelation 21 says this, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
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For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.
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And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
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And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.
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He will dwell with them and they will be His people.
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And God Himself will be with them as their God.
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He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
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And death shall be no more.
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Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.
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For these former things have passed away.
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If you're in Christ this morning, that's the blessing.
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That restorative blessing is what you have to look forward to.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank You.
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I thank You for the good world that we have to look forward to.
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And I thank You that we know that in this world we will have trouble.
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But You have overcome the world.
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We know that the present sufferings that we have are not to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us.
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I pray even now, Lord, as we begin to draw to a close and prepare our hearts for communion, that You would remind us, Lord, to look to You.
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Those who are in Christ, Lord, that they would understand that there is restoration coming.
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And Lord, for those outside of Christ, let them know that condemnation is on their head.
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And apart from Jesus Christ, there is no life past this one.
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And we pray it in Jesus' name and for His sake.
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Amen.
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Let's stand together.