The Sinfulness of Sin

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Deceptiveness and Ruin of Sin

I want to begin our time today by, as I frequently do, I know, recount a story from some time in the past. Turning this time to the 19th century to recount the experiences of one author who shared a story at one time about being in his study writing by candlelight and seeing a moth flitting in through his window into his shadowy study.

On one particular summer's evening, he was working in his study by candlelight when a moth entered in through the opening window of his study and attracted to the light of the man's candle fluttered directly toward the open flame until it reached the glowing wick and fell lifeless on his desk.

The author, as he was looking at this happening for a moment, believed that the moth was dead. But then in a few mere seconds, the moth arose from the desk, regained its bearings, and again was attracted to the light of the candle.

Again, taking to the air, it drew near to the flame. And this man, being a merciful man, as I trust many of you would try to do, sought with his hand to guide the moth away from the flame. But with every effort that he exerted to direct the moth away, it sought to go over and under and around his hand until at last it accomplished its goal, it reached the flame, and it perished there at the tip of the candle.

Now commenting on this, the author recounted that this had happened, in fact, several times before. And that it, in fact, always happened this way. That every moth that entered into his study through the hall or through the window and was captivated, became captivated by the light, would do all that it could to reach the flame.

And though the man would seek to rescue each of these foolish moths, in his own words he said, it was only for a little while that one could keep it from destruction. For each moth was desperately set on mischief and bent on suicide.

And likening the suicidal tendencies of these moths to the folly of sin, the author wrote this, he said, so it was and so it is with man, either with naked overt sin or else with covert lust and ill disposition.

He is so consumed by and so fascinated with sin that he will plunge his soul into ruin. Last week we heard a similar opening from our brother Sam, as he directed our attention to the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in the midst of Genesis chapter 3.

And we heard how it was that Eve was deceived and came to desire sin. How that there was a readiness amongst this first man and woman to engage in that act of sin, and how when they fell they responded wrongly.

And this week we are going to continue just a bit longer on this theme of sin. But today rather than dwelling on that initial act of sin, in the garden we will look at the effects of that sin in the lives of sinners.

You see like a candle lit in a dim room, sin catches the eye of its unsuspecting victim. It is enticed or it entices and allures us. It is a delight to the senses and so it draws us in. But there are deadly consequences for those who draw near to it.

And my dear brothers and sisters as we look at this example of our first parents Adam and Eve, here in Genesis chapter 3, my aim today is to show you the utter sinfulness of sin. Oh the deceptiveness of sin, the deceitfulness, the destructiveness of sin, the intoxicating like that flame in that study, the intoxicating and ruinous effects of disobeying and rebelling against God Himself.

We live in a world where sin is treated as a very light thing. Even light in our own hearts and minds if you can believe it. But my hope today, as long as it is called today, is to exhort you not to be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, but rather to see the brutal and grotesque nature of disobedience against a good and holy God.

I want you to leave here today hating and abhorring sin with a greater passion than ever before. While at the same time recognizing the goodness of our God toward us in spite of our great sinfulness. Today we will enter into a careful study of the hideousness of sin and the graciousness of God in the midst of that sin.

So I invite you to turn with me to Genesis chapter 3. If you haven't already, in verse 8 we will direct our attention there. And reading verses 8 and 9 and then moving through to the end of verse 13, I want to lay before you five truths concerning sin.

Concerning the sinfulness of sin. So we read in Genesis chapter 3 in verse 8. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Sin Brings Separation from God

The first truth that I want to bring before you concerning sin is this. That sin brings separation. Sin brings separation. Now I know that our brother dealt with this passage at least verse 8 last week.

But he did not nor did he intend to provide an exhaustive explanation. But you'll remember that last week our brother Pastor Sam showed us how Adam and Eve responded wrongly in their sin. Rather than running to God, they ran away from Him.

But this week I want to show you that verse 8 illustrates the relational separation that took place between God and man. In verse 8 we find the Lord God walking in the cool or literally the breeze of the day.

We see this anthropomorphism. Our brother introduced us to that word last week. This depiction of God in human terms ascribing Him with human qualities. Scripture does tell us that God is spirit and that He is invisible.

So why would it be that Moses is the inspired author. Why would he tell us that God was walking in the garden? As if the sound of God's footsteps could be heard along one of the shale paths in the midst of the garden.

It is almost certainly universally recognized that this is a reference to God's walking in the garden. Hints at the relational intimacy that Adam and Eve enjoyed with God, the Lord their God, before the fall.

We could point to many examples, but we don't have to look much further than Genesis chapter 5 and verse 24 to see an example of this use of the word walking as it relates to that communion spent with the living God.

In Genesis 5 .24 we read about Enoch who were told walked with God and he was not for God took him. Now what does it mean that Enoch walked with God? The mention of Enoch's walking conveys that he knew a level of communion with him that was so intimate, so pronounced, so unique that one day God simply took him from the face of the earth.

What a life well lived. But Enoch had, dear brothers and sisters, nothing on Adam and Eve. Our first parents enjoyed a level of familiarity and fellowship with God that has in all of human history only ever been rivaled by one man.

That is the man, the God-man, the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Now imagine for a moment, just suspend disbelief with me and picture this in your mind's eye, what it would have been like to live on this earth in its present configuration and to commune with God face to face, one with another as a man does his friend.

What a wondrous privilege it would have been to befriend God himself. To walk in perfect harmony with him, to know something that we have never known outside of Christ. True peace and fellowship with God.

Not just to walk with him by faith, but to walk with God by sight. What would you tell him, brethren, if you were to walk with God? What questions would you ask him? What praises would you say directly to him as you look at his wondrous face?

We cannot even begin to comprehend what it was like to know God in that way. But sin. But sin. When Adam and Eve fell into sin, all of this fellowship, this communion with God, that our souls have longed for, all of this in a moment was gone.

Not by a gradual decline. It was not by a slow regression. But the very sin that promised to make man like God separated man from God and that immediately. So when God walked in the cool of the day in the garden, Adam and Eve did not meet him as they might have done many times before.

But they fled from him as one who flees the plague. That word presence in verse 8, if we were to look at that in the original language, is the Hebrew word paneh, which also can be translated to mean the front or the face of God.

They could not look God in his face. So rather they hid from it. Now dear Christians, we think lightly of sin, more lightly of sin than we realize. But this is what sin does in our lives. And we know it, that it separates us from God.

It promises us knowledge. It assures us of future pleasures. But in the process it steals the most precious thing from us, communion with God Almighty himself. So the very sound of his voice is no longer sweet in our ears, but it burns our consciences as we turn and flee from him.

Though Psalm 16 tells us that in God's presence there is fullness of joy. This sin causes us not to seek that presence, but to turn about and not only not seek his face, but to run and to hide. Isaiah 59 in verse 2 tells us that our sin has made a separation.

Our iniquities have made a separation between us and our God. And our sins have hidden his face from us so that he does not hear. Now if you are a genuine Christian in your right mind, and that is key, a genuine Christian in your right mind, is there anything else that is better?

Anything in all of existence that is more precious to you than God himself? Some of you have not felt that for a long time. But in our right minds, is there anything else that is more desirable than to know and to be in the presence of the living God?

There is absolutely nothing, but he is our all. Whom do we have in heaven but him? And there is nothing on earth that we desire besides him. Why then, I ask, do we gravitate towards sin like a moth towards a flame and plunge our souls into ruin by separating ourselves from our God?

But observe how Adam and Eve are treated by God himself. In verse 8 we see that God here is referred to the Lord God. That is, again in the original language, Yahweh Elohim, one of the covenant names of God.

And Bible scholars see this here, just this reference of the Lord God walking in the garden as a hint that the Lord has not yet abandoned his covenant people or his desire for a relationship with his people, with us.

He could have destroyed the world. Think about this in a moment. He could have destroyed the world in an instant. He could have destroyed Adam and Eve, the moments that their mouths touched that forbidden fruit.

But instead, what does he do? But we find the Lord God, our covenant-keeping God, walking in the garden in what is now we know the first theophany of the Bible. That word theophany, it's a word that combines two Greek words, the word God and appearing, where God appears to man and it's recorded in Scripture.

And here we find the first theophany in the Bible. And with each appearance of God in time and space recorded in the Bible, it anticipates something that is to come, the ultimate theophany. That is the appearing of the Son of God.

The very incarnation of God himself in human flesh, in time and space, in history. And that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Now some people might come here on this Sunday between Christmas and New Year's and say, we were really hoping for a Christmas sermon.

I want to give you that Christmas sermon right now. Here we see a foreshadowing, a hint at the incarnation of Christ, even as God himself condescends to be with Adam and Eve, sinful man and woman, in the garden.

Long before Christ came in the flesh, God appeared on the earth in the garden looking for his enemies in hiding that he might reconcile them to himself. In the words of one commentator, it was God, their creator, who now is God, the redeemer, was seeking the lost.

Note with me then, the kindness of God. Though there are real consequences for our sins, and we are acquainted with those consequences, even after the fall, by his own divine initiative, God sought to reconcile us to himself, so that though we are separated by sin like Enoch, we might still walk with God.

But how few there are. How few there are among us who walk and live like Enoch. Many of us live like Adam and Eve, still hidden in the garden. And dear brethren, I would exhort you, do not allow yourself to grow accustomed to separation from God.

How frequently we allow just that, but sin in our lives, and a marred conscience, and rather than running to God, we run from God. And many of us, we must confess, live like functional atheists, where we do not seek God, nor do we have any semblance of communion with him in our lives.

We have a few brief intercessions that we offer up here and there from time to time, but let me ask you, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, is it possible that sin, sin in your own lives, has caused you to stray from walking with God?

When was the last time you enjoyed that sweet communion with Him? Where you woke, and He was the first one on your mind. And as you went to sleep, He was the last one on your mind. And through your day, whether at work or school or wherever it was, you walked with Him.

I'm reminded of the words of one brother who says, that we will always sneak away to go and to do, to spend time with that one whom we love. When was the last time your soul desired to slip away, and to spend time with God?

Because that was your greatest desire, to know Him and to walk with Him. Is it possible that we are better imitators of Adam and Eve hiding in the garden, than Enoch walking with his God? But even after the fall, God has not designed it to be this way.

If we were to look in 1 Chronicles 16, in verse 11 for instance, we see this exhortation which reads almost as a complete contrast to the account that we just looked at in Genesis 3. Where it says there, Seek the Lord.

Seek the Lord and His strength. Seek His presence continually. Not to flee from, but to run toward. Or in Jeremiah chapter 9, in verse 23. There I read, it is perhaps one of my favorite verses, or favorite two verses in the book of Jeremiah.

In verse 23, it says, Thus says the Lord, Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom. Let not the mighty man boast in his might. Let not the rich man boast in his riches. But let him who boasts, boast in this, that he understands and knows Me.

That I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth. For these things I delight, declares the Lord. Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, to flee the sin that separates you from God and press on to know the Lord.

Casting off every sin that seeks to entangle you and to seek His face continually. Last year I preached around this time, a sermon on making biblical resolutions. Some of you will remember that. And we looked at Jonathan Edwards' biblical resolutions.

Now I'm not sure if you are still making resolutions this year, but if you make one resolution, let it be this, that this year I will come to know my God better and to walk with Him. There's a little quote that I come back to again and again.

Some of you have heard me quote it before. It's from a man named Howard Guinness, who was one of the founders of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He wrote a little book entitled, Sacrifice.

And in this book he delivers, still what remains to me at least, one of the most powerful quotes that I am familiar with. He says, Where are the men and women of this generation who will hold their lives cheap and be faithful unto death, who will lose their lives for Christ's, flinging them away for love of Him?

And here it is. Where are the men of prayer? Where are the men who count God's Word of more importance to them than their daily food? Where are the men who, like Moses of old, commune with God face to face?

Where are God's men in this day of God's power? But there is a second truth that I want to bring before you as it relates to sin. We see in verse 10. And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.

Sin Brings Fear and Anxiety

There are a few points that can be made from verse 10. The first of which I want to make is this, that sin not only brings separation, but that sin brings fear. That sin brings fear. We should not at all be surprised, not even for a moment, that there is no mention of fear in the Bible until there is the mention of sin.

And yet once we see that mention of sin, fear comes in very quickly afterward. Make no mistake, the reason why our world is riddled with sinful anxieties and fears is because our world is riddled with sin and transgression.

And that fear and anxiety itself arises out and as a direct result of sin. Where do we find that though? In 1 John 4, in verse 18, we see the Apostle John speak about this. He says there, there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

You'll remember a number of months ago, I brought up a study that had spoken about the increase in fear and anxiety in young people that just in the last 10 years, that those figures have doubled, that there are two times as many people diagnosed with anxiety today than there were around the invention, the time of the invention of the iPhone.

Why is that? Well for one, it trends exactly with the abandonment of God in our society. As the world goes, as the world transgresses and increases in their sin, so increases the fear of not only God, but of everything under the sun.

In Hebrews 10, in verse 27, we read, but fearful, there is a fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire that will consume God's adversaries. You don't have to turn there, but I'll quote it from Proverbs 28, 1.

The wicked flee when no one pursues. Why is it? Because there is a fear. It is a fear of God somewhere, somehow. They don't know it exactly, but it is there and they flee, though none pursue. Meanwhile, we read, but the righteous are bold as lions.

Imagine a world, for those of you who struggle with anxiety and fear, a world completely free of fear, free of the fear of death, free from social anxieties, free from the anxiety of preaching on the Lord's Day in front of his people, free from whatever anxiety that might be.

But in the moment when sin entered the world, fear entered the world. And yet how does God relate to Adam and Eve in their fear, in their hiding from him? One observer writes that God is depicted as a gentle father seeking out his own.

That not only does he come and condescend,.

As it were,.

The first theophany in the Bible to interact with his sinful children,.

Adam and Eve,.

But he comes not pronouncing fierce judgments, but with merciful questions. Now I recall there was a young lady that for a time, my wife probably dreads thinking about these days, we had a couple living in our home.

That was, it was an eclectic experience,.

I will say that.

We were into some interesting ideas about monastic thought and I would have had dreadlocks if I think Nicole had allowed it, but some of our roommates had dreadlocks and I remember being in our kitchen, reading my Bible and one of our friends who was living with us because it was just that, a new monastic life, this was about 15 years ago, this is not something I'm meddling in today, came downstairs with her Bible and she was doing deconstruction before it was cool and she was reading in Genesis chapter 3 and she said, God is walking in the garden and he's asking where they are and what are they doing and it would seem to me that God is omniscient.

He is not omniscient, he is not omnipresent, he does not know all things, he is, if he did know them, he wouldn't have to ask them, but is that what God is doing as he poses these questions to Adam and Eve?

I would suggest to you that it is not a God who is not omniscient, who does not know all, who is not omnipresent, but in fact it is a God who is coming with questions posed in mercy to the recipients of those questions.

God comes to Adam and Eve with questions just as the Lord Jesus Christ came to the woman at the well in John chapter 4 with questions, not with accusations and with wrath, but with questions to elicit an awareness of their own, of her own sin.

Psalm 139 tells us that God knows all things, that we cannot hide from his presence, nor can we hide from his knowledge, but here, as John MacArthur would put it, God appeared as before in tones of goodness and kindness.

Another commentator adds to this, he says, God's first words to fallen man has all the marks of grace. It is a question since to him, since to help him he must draw him rather than drive him out of hiding.

It would be my desire, dear brothers and sisters, that all of us would live free from sinful anxieties and unreasonable fears. We are commanded and so we must fear God. We must have a reverential awe of God that that is important, that is necessary, that is a must in the Christian life, but apart from God the only thing that we should fear perhaps is sin or the displeasure of God and nothing else.

And I say this to you as a fellow sufferer that the Lord knows, my wife knows, the struggles I have had over the years with anxieties and yet I'm reminded of how frequently it says in Scripture that we are to fear not.

That expression fear not appears in our Bibles 71 times that we are not to fear. Sometimes I will pray with someone and I will pray from Philippians 4 and verses 6 and 7 that we are not to be anxious for anything but by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving we are to make our requests known to God and the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.

Will guard our hearts.

And minds in Christ Jesus. I remember praying that with one of my children and one of my children said to me, Dad how do you know that. By heart because I need that verse. Because apart from understanding the goodness and the kindness of God I too would be driven into the bushes in fear and oh that we would be freed from that fear.

But how?

The best way to live free from anxiety and sinful anxieties and fears is to have a thorough understanding.

Of the love of God.

Now am I making that up? Is that a Sunday school answer? God loves you you need to believe that and that will save you to go back to 1 John 4 and verse 18 there is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear.

We are sinners. Oh we are great sinners and yet we have such a merciful and kind and sovereign God who extends that love and his mercy and his grace to us even in our sinfulness so that we need not fear all the things in this world that can kill us all the molecules in this world that might threaten us but that there is no maverick molecule in all the universe to quote R .C. Sproul and that is controlled by a sovereign God who loves us and who is causing for those of you who are Christians all things to work together for good to those who love him and to those who are called according to his purpose.

And then secondly if you struggle with sinful anxiety and fear in your life walk with a clear conscience.

Before God.

Understanding not only that he loves us and that he is sovereign over every circumstance in our lives that everything that happens to us will ultimately serve our good but walk before him with a clear conscience just as sin mars our relationship with our conscience.

Or sorry.

Our relationship with God so in mars our consciences and therefore gives an avenue for sinful anxieties to enter our lives.

But we're told.

By the author of Hebrews. But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. The third truth that I want to put before you.

Is this.

That sin brings denial. In verse 10 we see it again that here as God puts this question.

To Adam and Eve.

Adam attributes his hiding in the garden not to his sin but to the consequences of his sin. See this with me that rather than acknowledging his sin of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in verse 10 he says.

I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid. Why was I afraid? Not because I sinned. I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. On this point one observer writes. The basic reluctance of sinful people to admit their iniquity is here established that man and women mankind in general has been making excuses for his sin since the very beginning.

I used to work as a first responder and one of the things that we would teach I taught first aid CPR to my fellow colleagues. And one of the things that I would teach as it related to a heart attack was that the very first symptom of a heart attack is denial and amongst the first symptoms of sin is denial.

That there is a deceitfulness about sin that as you enter into it it numbs the conscience. It's like the saliva on the bed bug. I remember us being just terrified of bed bugs.

When we were.

When we had young children the saliva of the bed bug that anesthetizes the skin around it so that it does not awaken you as you're being eaten alive by these bugs in your bed that came out of nowhere.

I'm sorry. Sin brings the insanity of minimizing the act of sin and its consequences. Therefore we should not be surprised therefore that much of the Christian world around us treats sin so lightly that sin has a numbing effect it has a dulling effect.

On our lives.

And we've all experienced this haven't we as we live our Christian lives and as we carry on through our days. Today wasn't that different from yesterday. But we've all been in situations where we look back not yesterday but six months ago or a year ago or five years ago.

And we say to ourselves something has changed the sin that I never would have tolerated five years ago. I readily tolerate today that there is a that there has been a numbing of my conscience that there has been a searing of the conscience and these sins that I would never have entertained at one time I've slowly entered into.

Dear brothers and sisters we must not be hardened by this deceitfulness of sin. Matthew Henry says this. It's almost humorous. He says. Observe the startling question Adam where art thou. Those who sin go astray from God and should seriously consider where they are.

When we enter into sin he says they are afar off from all good in the midst of their enemies in the bondage of Satan in the high road to utter ruin Spurgeon told a story that was absolutely sobering on the deceitfulness and the dangers of this kind of sin this dulling sin that sears our consciences so that it no longer feels now.

For those of you who know anything about Charles Spurgeon he ministered the gospel in the 19th century right around the time of the second industrial revolution and near the advent of the steam engine.

And so in these factories in London there was the introduction of these steam engines. And you can picture a steam engine locomotive right. You can picture that with me a steam engine in a factory turning cranks and pistons and gears and speeding up the manufacturing industry to a great degree.

But he.

As he's speaking about this think about this for a moment. The alarm when they moved from horse-drawn technology and hand and foot and water-drawn technology to steam technology. That first man working in that manufacturing shop who is working around this equipment for the first time and the hem of his garment.

Gets stuck.

In one of the cogs.

Just.

Just one square inch of fabric in that wheel. And as Spurgeon speaks about these machines he says this imagine the horror when that man that man would have experienced when as the roaring steam engines huffed the fierce cranks turned that poor man was caught perhaps by one square inch of fabric as those gears turned and that machine pulled its victim into its gears into its rollers and he was torn and crushed and became so entangled in the machine that he was completely destroyed.

Just imagine the horror of that scene. And Spurgeon says if only that piece of cloth would have given way so that man's life might be spared but it did not. And so it is with sin. You cannot get between the wheels of iniquity and say I shall go just so far and then no further.

No if you once get in there you will be ground to pieces as certainly as you are now alive. There is no way of escape but to turn yourself right away from the evil thing that God hates. How many of us brothers and sisters because of the dulling effects of sin are playing near the machinery of sin with our robes.

Hanging.

To be grabbed at any moment or toying.

With it.

Feeding the edge of our garment to see how far it can go in before it sucks us in whole. Now how does the Lord respond here. Even as man seeks to hide his sin and to deceive God himself again I would say that it anticipates his response anticipates Christ.

Only this time it would be one who would receive the just punishment due to another Christ who would be accused of sin and put to death in one of the most cruel ways imaginable. And yet in that remaining silent as it says in Isaiah 53 in verse 7.

He was oppressed and he was afflicted. Yet he opened not his mouth like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before its shears is silent. So he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

And as for his generation who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living stricken for the transgression of my people and they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man.

In his death.

Although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth yet it was the will.

Of the Lord.

To crush him he has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt he shall see his offspring he shall prolong his days the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hands. As God comes not with an accusation but with a question the man deflects but when the Lord.

Jesus.

In his perfect spotlessness came to this earth and he was maligned and every false accusation was leveled against him he remained silent and received it in our place. Christ was crushed in the machinery of God's wrath for our sin he suffered the wrath that we deserve.

For those of you who are in our signal chat you know I said practice a song we're going to sing it later and alas we struggled so much in our preparations that we couldn't sing it. But I want to read to you from verse 2 in that song the song is Ah Holy Jesus go home.

If you haven't already listened to it listen to the framing.

Of that song.

That man who in the 1600s endured trial after trial after trial illness. Our family listened to it last night during family worship the recounting of this man.

Who was.

Sick and infirm as a child and then sick and infirm as a youth and then sick and infirm as a young adult.

And then.

He finally gets married and then the Lord takes his wife before they can have children. And then he goes through the plague and then my children marveled not the 3 year war or the 10 year war but the 30 year war.

And then he writes these words in this hymn who was the guilty who brought this upon thee. He is speaking about Christ alas my trees and Jesus hath undone thee. T 'was I Lord Jesus.

I.

It was denied thee.

I.

Crucified thee and because Christ was silent as he was led to the slaughter oh that the Lord saves us. Sin brings as well number 4 truth. Number 4 sin brings shame. We see again in verse 10. If you'll tolerate just one more reference in verse 10 he said I was afraid because I was naked.

Sin Brings Shame

What's really interesting is that we see in verses 8 and 9. Specifically in verse 8 that phrase midway through the verse and the man and his wife. The very last time we saw that expression the man and his wife was in Genesis chapter 2 and verse 25.

If you'll look there with me briefly right at the end of chapter 2 and the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. You see here that that nakedness is synonymous with an unashamedness. That they were naked and yet they were not ashamed.