Themes From Genesis with R. C. Sproul, “Punishment or Grace,” 6

Covenant Reformed Baptist Church

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Well, already now in our study of Genesis, we've looked at the creation of Adam and Eve, the creation of the world, the creation of man, the institution and ordination of marriage, and we looked at the temptation that was brought to our original parents by Satan.

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But one thing we haven't touched yet, and that is the result of Adam and Eve's acts of disobedience.

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What happened to the human race as a result of their act of sin?

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Let's take a look for a moment at the end of chapter 3 of Genesis.

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Let's pick it up at verse 14. And the Lord God said to the serpent,

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Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle, above every beast of the field.

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And upon your belly shall you go, and dust shall you eat all the days of your life.

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And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.

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And it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

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But before we go on, let's look at this little section right here, where when God responds to the act of transgression, which is an offense against His nature, it's an act of lawlessness against God as the supreme judge of the universe.

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It places man in a status of moral indebtedness because man failed to keep the obligations that God rightfully imposed upon him.

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Now the immediate result of this is that God's judgment comes down, but we notice that in the initial stages of the judgment there's something wrong, something missing, something doesn't fit.

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Do you remember the warning that God gave in the prohibitions to Adam and Eve?

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He said to them that the day that you shall eat of it, what would happen?

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You shall die? You shall surely die.

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He underlines that, puts emphasis on it. If you eat of this tree, the penalty for that, the sanction that I'm putting around this activity is that if you eat, you surely die.

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It's an if -then construction. If A, B will inevitably follow. There's no negotiating that.

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This is the rule of God. Now let me ask you this first of all. Suppose that God had exacted that penalty immediately, that as soon as Adam and Eve ate of the apple, they would have dropped dead, and that would have been the end of the race.

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Would such a punishment have been unjust? Would such a punishment have been unjust?

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You know, I've lectured on this in other series, but I want to call your attention to it again, and that is that so often we look at the

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New Testament and we say, well, the New Testament is filled with mercy and love and grace, and the Old Testament is filled with harsh judgment and justice and wrath and all of that, as if there were two different gods.

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But don't you see that from the middle of chapter 3 of Genesis through the rest of the

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Bible, the accent is on grace, because what is immediately evident is that God does not execute the full measure of penalty that He has established for this violation.

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God does not destroy Adam and Eve. He allows them to live.

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Now some of you are going to… I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, now wait a minute, but they didn't live.

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They suffered spiritual death that day. Yes, they did suffer spiritual death as part of the consequences of their sin, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

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But the threat of judgment that God had spoken to them went beyond spiritual death.

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It was death, death, the Greek thanatos, you know, being, forfeiting the very power of life.

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Now maybe you think that penalty is so severe that God couldn't in His justice have enacted it, that God was like sometimes parents are when they want so much to keep their children in line.

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They will be over -severe in their threats. If you do this, I'm going to wring your neck, where you have no intention of wringing their neck.

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You maybe want to swat them on the backside, but you're not going to wring their neck. And maybe this is all we have here is

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God overstating the penalty. Well think of it. Would it be unjust if God would have removed the gift of life from Adam and Eve?

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What had they done in their act of disobedience?

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Who did they defy? Who did they defy? The One who created them, the

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One to whom they owed everything, the garden, the food that they ate, the bodies that they enjoyed, the air that they breathed, the thoughts that they thought, everything they had, everything that they enjoyed, everything that they possessed they owed absolutely to their

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Creator. Now what else about the Creator? Was the Creator an imperfect

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Creator who was a bumbler and who, you know, had to work from scratch and work with several different models and maybe didn't do such a good job and so we could shift the blame to Him?

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The Creator is perfectly righteous. There's no shadow of turning in Him. He is a holy

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God, and yet man, who is finite from the dust contingent, raises his fist in defiance against the eternally holy, self -existent

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Creator of the universe. When we think about arch -criminals in our society, you maybe will think of Jack the

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Ripper or of Judas and so on, but some of those who reach the elevated levels of infamy include such people as Benedict Arnold, the

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Rosenbergs, and so on, because they committed what we call heinous acts of treason against the government of the

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United States. Now if crimes of treason are considered gross and heinous because we kill the

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President of the United States, world wars have been fought over killing high -ranking officials, how about if you commit an act of treason against the supreme governor of the universe?

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You realize that when you sin and when I sin, what we are saying is that, God, You're wrong and I'm right.

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I challenge His omniscience. I challenge His knowledge. Or, I say,

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I'm going to do this because I want to do this and You can't stop me.

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I challenge His power, His might, but most of all

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I challenge His right to rule, His right to govern, and that is treason.

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Remember, Paul tells us that the basic sin of man is man's refusal to honor

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God as God and to be grateful to God. Now in this act of transgression in the garden,

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Adam and Eve dishonored God and exhibited extreme ingratitude to their

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Creator. Now, it's an offense against an infinitely perfect and infinitely holy being, and I think the theologians are correct when they say that a just penalty for a crime against an infinitely valuable being is infinite and eternal punishment.

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But God did not do that.

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Instead, He allowed Adam and Eve to continue their existence.

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But there were penalties imposed. What were the penalties?

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God pronounces a curse, a curse that focuses primarily on one word, pain, pain and humiliation.

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There's a sense in which the entrance of pain and humiliation are marked at the gateway to the garden of Eden, and the pain and humiliation begins with the serpent who became the vehicle for the satanic seduction.

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And God says to the serpent, from this day forth you are going to be the lowest beast of the field.

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You crawl on your belly. You eat dust. And not only that,

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I'm going to build in a kind of hostility or aversion or enmity between you and these people whom

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I have established, giving dominion over the world. There's going to be a special kind of repulsion between you and mankind.

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Have you ever wondered about the role of the snake in the history of Western civilization, in cultures, in art, in literature, that when somebody wants to be particularly fiendish in moving into the occult, they begin to worship or play with snakes, to act against this basic enmity that we have there?

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Have you ever noticed yourself feeling an irrational or what seems to be an irrational hostility towards snakes?

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We know that black snakes are helpful, they're good, and yet there's something gruesome about snakes.

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But not only does the pain and the curse come upon them, but it comes upon the woman pain in the natural act of delivering children.

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One of the greatest moments of personal self -fulfillment that a human being can ever experience is giving birth to a child.

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And yet, God has associated a level of pain that makes it a very difficult price to pay to experience the ecstasy of childbirth.

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And what about the man? It's not that he is sentenced to labor as a punishment for the fall.

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Man and woman were called to work before the fall ever takes place. Work isn't the curse, but what is the curse?

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The earth will resist the efforts of man.

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The thorns will spring up. Which is it easier to grow, weeds or flowers? You wonder about that?

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And not only that, but now there is an added burden of sweat and difficulty that attaches itself to the making of a living.

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There are all kinds of obstacles out there, thorns and sweat that makes it difficult to provide shelter, clothing, food, life itself and its necessities to and for his family.

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Well, notice that in this curse there is also a promise, what some scholars call the announcement of the proto -evangel.

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Now what do you suppose that word means? What does proto mean? What's a prototype?

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What's a prototype? Have you ever heard the word prototype? Everybody's heard the word prototype.

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What is it? What kind of a model is it? What kind of experimental model is it?

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What's the difference between a prototype and a deuterotype? It's the first.

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That's right. It comes from the Greek word protos, which means first in a series. So the proto -evangel, do you know what that word means?

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You get the word evangelism from it. It comes from the Greek ewangelion, which is the

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New Testament word for gospel. So the first proclamation of the gospel is the proto -evangel, the proto -evangel, the first proclamation of the gospel in all of sacred

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Scripture. Did you hear it when I read it? When God says,

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I will put enmity, verse 15, Genesis 3, 15, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.

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Now what does that mean? Between the descendants of Eve and the descendants of the serpent, there will be hostility.

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And then what? And it, that is the descendants of the serpent seed, will bruise –

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I'm sorry – it, the descendant of Eve, will bruise your head, speaking to the serpent, and you shall bruise his heel.

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And so the picture there is what? Of a man or a child or a woman, some descendant of Eve, walking down the street and lying in the shadows there is this serpent or this snake, and the serpent comes out to get the human being, and the human being crushes the head of the serpent with his heel.

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But in the process, what does the serpent do? Bites him in the heel.

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And this is seen as the foreshadowing of what event? The cross, where the head of Satan is crushed on the cross, but at the painful price of bruising the

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Lamb of God. He was bruised for our iniquities. He is bruised by the very

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One He is conquering so that Christ doesn't go through this unscathed.

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But He is victorious when He crushes the head of the serpent.

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Okay, verse 18, then in verse 17, in sorrow shall you eat of it all the days of your life that is from the ground.

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Thorns also and thistles shall bring it forth to you, and you shall eat the herb of the field.

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And in the sweat of your face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken.

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For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

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Now here's what happens. God does not rescind the death penalty for sin.

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In fact, here He sentences man to what?

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To death. But what He does in exercising

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His executive clemency is He grants a temporary stay of execution.

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But at the judgment, at the edge of the garden, God pronounces man and woman guilty, and He said, you will die, physically die.

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You came from the dust, you're going to go back to the dust. You're going to die. And I'm not going to remove that, but I am going to punish the serpent.

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I am going to hold out a gospel of redemption for you, and while I'm working that out, in the meantime,

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I will grant you graciously an extension of life. It will be a painful life.

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You will have lost some of your dignity that you enjoyed in the garden.

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It will be a life that will incur humiliations from time to time, and it will move inexorably towards the dust because you will die.

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But it is this dimension of the original sentence that is removed today.

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On the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. God said, I'm not going to do that.

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I'm going to grant mercy. I'm going to give you a stay of execution, and in that stay of execution, we're going to redeem the human race.

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But you don't touch the tree of life until the penalty for this sin has been taken care of, ultimately.

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So death is the result of sin. This is the point that the

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Bible says that we often don't pay attention to in our culture, that death is not natural.

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Death is supernatural. Inasmuch as death is a penalty that God has given to the human race because of sin.

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And the reason why everybody dies is because everybody's tainted by sin. You say, wait a minute, what about babies that die within six weeks after they're born or within six hours after they're born?

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Are they killed for their sins? No, they're not killed for committing actual sin, but that child is born in sin.

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He's born infected and blemished with the fallenness of the race from which he has been brought.

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The Bible teaches that. We may not like it, and some of the natural historians and philosophers say, well all this is is nothing but a myth or a fable or a parable.

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We talked about that one other time, okay? But again, we have to account for the fact that everybody in the world sins.

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Why is it that everybody sins? Why is everybody a sinner?

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Do we sin because we are sinners, or are we sinners because we sin?

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We sin because we are sinners, which is to say that every human being has a sin nature, a nature that is fallen.

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And out of this sin nature flows sins. I am a sinner with a capital

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S. That's why I am a sinner with a little s. Does that make sense? Now the thing that's where people get confused is that people will ask me often, do you believe in original sin?

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Well, of course I believe in original sin, and I just might add, even though that concept is under much attack today, the idea of some notion of original sin is part of the heritage of every single church in the world council of churches.

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The Roman Catholic Church has a doctrine of original sin. The Lutheran Church has a doctrine of original sin. The Presbyterian Churches have a doctrine of original sin.

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The Episcopalian Church has a doctrine of original sin. Methodist Church, Baptist Church, you name it, they all have some doctrine of original sin.

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Now they may debate about the extent of man's fallenness and what remains in terms of man's natural powers, but everyone recognizes that man has fallen.

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Now when we talk about original sin, we do not mean the first sin.

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That's where people get confused. Original sin is not the original sin or the first sin that was ever committed.

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Original sin refers to the result of the first sin. What original sin refers to is this fallen sin nature that is part of the punishment for the first sin.

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When Adam and Eve acted against God, they didn't act as private individuals.

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Adam's very name, Adam, means what? Man. Eve, woman, the mother of the living.

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These two stood as our supreme representatives before Almighty God, and God said,

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I'm going to test the entire race. You and your descendants with this experience in the garden.

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And what you do will have consequences not only for you, but for those whom you represent.

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I don't have time to get into the theology of this, but I just might ask you to remember in passing that never ever in your life were you better represented than you were in paradise.

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This is the first time and the only time in your lives that you had an infallibly selected representative.

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God doesn't make mistakes. When God selects a representative for you, you can be sure that your representative perfectly represented you, okay?

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So you were there by representation. And so we all suffer the consequences, which is this sin nature.

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And that sin nature is sometimes described as the state of spiritual death.

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We are dead in sin, the Bible says. We are dead to the things of the

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Spirit, to the things of God, unless we are reborn from above, unless God the Holy Spirit quickens new life within us.

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So two kinds of death come into play at the fall, spiritual death, and how soon does that take place?

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Immediately, physical death, which is inevitable but not immediate, okay?

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Remember, dear, benign, lovely Mother Nature is the greatest mass killer of them all.

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Mother Nature has killed every one of her sons and daughters, with the exception of those who are still living on the earth, waiting their execution.

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And it is because we are sinners that we must die. And even though we have been promised life after death, and death for the

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Christian is not the same as death for the unbeliever, because for us it's a transition, a moving to something greater than we have here.

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Nevertheless, there is still a little bit of fear, a little bit of pain.

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There's still a sting to it, because it is the last enemy to be destroyed.

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And from this day, Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden to live east of Eden.

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And God placed a sentry at the gates to paradise, an angel with a flaming sword, the first act of government on this planet, government with force, government with power, government with a sword to prevent entry, unlawful entry into paradise.

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The rest of Scripture tells about not simply the restoration of paradise, but the redemption of paradise, so that what we have as Christians is not merely paradise regained.

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It's not like we get a second chance to go back there and be a restored state of innocence and have to go through the trial again.

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But we go to a paradise where the new Adam has prevailed, and death is no more, and pain is no more, because sin is no more.