The Problem Is Sin - Part 2

Well, good morning.

Genesis 3 and the Human Tendency to Blame Shift

If you do have a Bible, turn to Genesis 3. In your pew Bible, it's going to be on page number 3, and we're going to be reading Genesis 3, 11 through 13. We're continuing our study on basic truths, and the basic truth that we have today is the truth that the problem is sin, and this is the second part in that particular problem that we're addressing.

When you do have Genesis 3, 11, go ahead and stand for the reading of God's Word. Genesis 3, 11. He said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree,.

And I ate.

Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

Amen?

You may be seated. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you for the words that you have given to us which help us to understand the basic human condition. Pray that you help us today to learn great things from your Word and to know you and your purposes better.

In your Son's name I pray, amen. In 2013, a former extended family member of mine committed a crime that really in many ways is pretty unspeakable. So when you're living in the 21st century, family relations can be somewhat messy at times.

But in 2013, my cousin's ex-husband got in a fight with a baby and the baby lost. So at that time, he was recently divorced to my cousin, and he was living with his girlfriend.

At that time.

He was unemployed. He was out of work. And it was his job to watch the child, and the child at that point was basically a very young child. So the child was about 15 months old. And like, you know, children do at that time who are separated from their mom, and really in situations like, you know, the child has been in situations like that for the extent of his life.

But my cousin's ex-husband, he was watching the child. He obviously didn't have the natural affection for children that people normally do for their own biological children, but the child would not stop crying.

So the child would cry and cry and cry, and my cousin's ex-husband couldn't get the child to stop crying. And at some point, he described himself as essentially snapping. So he just snapped, started screaming at the child, and then dropped the child multiple times on the ground.

And those impacts resulted in the child's death. Now he's currently in prison for this, and he was convicted of it. He pleaded guilty for the involuntary manslaughter of the child, essentially. But it's interesting when you think about situations like that, and you try to explain.

Them.

So you're living in a time right now that's filled with rampant materialism, and the question you might want to ask when you're trying to figure out what happened there is, you know, what caused it? What brought that about?

And there's any number of explanations that you might give. Now, I mean, me knowing him as I knew him, I didn't have a close relationship with him. I really didn't interact with him very much. I don't have any feelings of negativity towards him.

Even after this act, I mostly feel pretty bad for him. So you might imagine that because he and my cousin got divorced, I'm predisposed to treat him as the worst kind of villain imaginable. But really, that's not the way I view him or that situation.

I don't have any strong feelings of anger towards him for that event or for, you know, whatever events happened within him and my cousin's relationship. In many ways, he was a quiet guy. He was the kind of guy that no one would expect that kind of thing to happen to.

In my mind, it's a very sobering situation because I look at that and I don't have the categories necessary to predict that event to happen, if that makes sense. Meaning, just like looking at him, seeing him in family situations.

He had two daughters at that time. He got divorced. He had two daughters at that time. No one who knew him would have thought that that would have been his story at that point in time. It's not something, really, that you would have predicted for anyone.

But yeah, I mean, how do you make sense of something like that? How do you put something like that into words? What kind of origin for that? What is the origin for that? How did it happen? I mean, certainly, you could think in terms of sociological explanations.

Certainly, he's out of work. Difficult economy. Struggles. Like, you could think about the struggles that happen financially with someone who's recently divorced, who has kids, who has bills to pay related to that.

You see that he's out of work. Difficult economy. General. There's all sorts of explanations you could give along those lines. Naturally, when we're confronted with situations like that, we lean on the language of psychology.

So, you think about him. You don't have a natural impulse, probably, to say, that was evil. Why did it happen? Well, because he's evil. He's a sinner. We try to stay away from the language of moral condemnation, even in situations like this.

I mean, you live in a society right now that is so hostile to a biblical ethic at almost every single point. But, if there's anything that you might have any outrage about still, it might be anything related to children being abused.

So, we still see that as something that's wrong. So, you see a situation like this, where a child dies. He's killed. Even in that kind of situation, though, I don't know that the language of moral evil is the language that's on our tongue.

I don't know the language of sin is the language that's on our tongue. We might say he's a psychopath. That's why he did it. He's a psychopath, right? And, in saying something like that, you understand that you're using language in a way to keep yourself from thinking about this in moral terms.

When he described the event, he said, you know, he had been going through a lot of stresses lately, and I told you about some of the possible stresses he could be going through. And, the sheriff described it as his mindset during that time, the things that were happening.

He just snapped. He described himself as just snapping. He just saw red and tired of being screamed at by a baby. I don't know if you're really allowed to say this, but if you've ever had a kid before, and you've encountered an inconsolable child, you understand how frustrating it is to be yelled at, even by small children.

It can be pretty frustrating to be yelled at. That doesn't, obviously, excuse this kind of event, but he described it, as I said, in the language. He just snapped. He saw red. He just started getting frustrated and dropped the baby multiple times.

He didn't wake up, you know, I promise you, he didn't wake up that day imagining that he was going to kill that child, but he does have a problem that we all have, and it's the same problem, that we're sinners, we have hearts that are evil, we have hearts that are wicked, and we might wrap our sin, and not in the language of personal responsibility, but in the language of victimization, when we seek to tell our stories, we have plenty of ways we try to blame shift our sin away from ourself, try to make it understandable, try to make it not so bad.

And certainly, this is an example of an individual that committed an act that should be, in many ways, sobering, but it tells us something about the nature of the human condition. On Genesis 3, 11 through 13, we have an example of a passage where the problem was clearly sin, but instead of owning up to it, our first parents did what so many of us are tempted to do when confronted with our own disobedience.

They chose the path of blame shifting. Now, how does the passage start? The passage starts like this in Genesis 3, 11. God is confronting Adam and Eve. They had just, if you remember from last week, they had just eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and after that, being motivated by guilt and shame, they're trying to hide themselves from each other.

They're trying to hide themselves from God, and God is confronting them at this point. So, God's asking them, you know, why are they hiding themselves, and they're telling him they're hiding themselves because they're naked.

And so, God's question to them is this. In Genesis 3, 11, he said, who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I have commanded you not to eat? The man said, the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.

When you're confronted with your sins, brothers and sisters, there really are only so many options that you can choose at that point. In this passage, we have an example of God confronting our first parents for their sin, and they, you know, their example is put forward to us as an example of the basic human tendencies when dealing with being confronted in these ways, but when you're confronted with your sins, there really, there's only so many options.

You can confess it. I mean, this isn't the most natural option that many of us take. We don't normally, when we are confronted with our sins, think as a first impulse, a first response to confess it. You can confess it.

I mean, you can deny it. If there's, you know, typically, if there's any way possible you can deny that this happens, that the sin you're being confronted of was actually you, like you were responsible for it, typically, as sinful human beings, our impulse is to try to deny it if we can, if we can.

So you can confess it, you can deny it. It seems like we more frequently try to deny it than confess it. You can try to justify it. I mean, there's many, many different ways you might try to justify it in the moment.

So, I mean, you can basically try to justify it and say, hey, it's not wrong. So when someone catches you in something, it's not wrong, that's just your opinion,.

Right?

You don't get to make the rules. You might try to go the route of justifying that, trying to make it understandable. You can flee the scene. This is more and more common now. I can tell you many stories, many stories of counseling situations where because you're living in a society that doesn't have the same level of courage as fast societies have done, where people, when they're confronted with their sin, they almost just become cripples.

They refuse to interact, they refuse to talk. I mean, I know of situations where adult human beings, when confronted with their sin, will go hide in a closet and cover their ears and refuse to talk about it.

So you can try to flee the scene in certain ways. That can happen in the kind of way I just described where the person is kind of presenting themselves as being the victim of the bully who is bringing the confrontation to bear.

You can imagine fleeing the scene happening with someone who just gets angry and leaves and slams doors and everything else. But the most natural response that we have when we're confronted with our sin is to blame.

Shift.

Particularly when a certain set of criteria happen. So when you're caught, when you're caught, caught, there's no escape, no way to deny it, pretend that you didn't understand that it's wrong. In those kind of situations, that's the kind of situation that Adam and Eve are in in this passage.

In that kind of situation, all that's really left to do if you don't want to confess it, which is, you know, there's a natural temptation for human beings to not want to confess it. All that's really left to do is to try to shift the blame.

And we are certainly living in a society right now that excels at running the same basic playbook as our first parents did, and that's the playbook of blame shifting.

What Blame Shifting Is and How Adam and Eve Did It

What is blame shifting?

Well, blame shifting is a behavioral pattern where an individual avoids taking responsibility for their actions by attributing fault or culpability to someone or something else. So it's a pattern of behavior where instead of taking personal responsibility, you're going to try to shift the blame on someone else or something else.

Okay?

As I said, we're living in a society that seems to particularly excel at this, and this is an example of what's happening in the passage itself. So how do our first parents blame shift? Well, notice what the text says in Genesis 3 .11.

When God confronts Adam for his sin, what did he do? He said, yeah, I did it. It's my fault. I'm the leader. You made me to be the leader of my home. I was created first. I had a responsibility to take this information that you've given me, the rules that you've given me.

I have a responsibility to lead my family into faithfulness to your Word, and I failed at that basic task. Is that what Adam did? You say, it's my fault.

I did it. I ate.

I did what you told me not to do. You told me not to do this. There's no lack of clarity here as to the nature of your expectations towards me. It was my fault. As a representative of my family, I've led my family, and by extension, the human race.

Into sin.

No, that isn't the path that Adam took. What did Adam do? Well, Adam, he sought first to direct the blame towards God, and then in a secondary sense, he sought to direct the blame towards his wife. So notice what he says.

The man says, the woman, right, the woman whom you gave to be with me. There's a hidden kind of attack on the character of God. Hey, you said that I was there. I remember you made woman. You presented her to me.

You said everything was very good. I thought this was going to be a good gift, but it turned out that this wasn't such a good gift. After all, she brought this fruit to me and told me to eat it, and so I just listened to what she said, right?

But yeah, how do our first parents blame? Adam, he seeks to direct the blame, not simply to the wife, but also to God, the giver of the wife. And that should tell us something about the nature of blame shifting, that in general, we have a great capacity to try to blame others for our actions.

And there's so many times when you're trying to blame others for your actions that you should remember that God is a good God. He's providentially arranged all of the affairs that you happen to go through.

There's no situation that you can go through that is a situation that is apart from God's plan for your life. God has ordered your steps. He's numbered your days. We know that we serve the kind of God who works all things according to the counsel of His will, and that means all the trials and all the difficulties and all the situations that you find yourself in, God has put you in that situation as a trial, as a test of your faith to produce steadfastness.

And so whenever you try to shift the blame off of yourself onto someone else, ultimately you're also shifting the blame to God who put you in that situation and had a plan for you to be right there. And we know, as James tells us, that no one, when they're tempted, they should say that they are being tempted by God, for God can't be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts.

No one.

But each one is tempted when they're lured and enticed by their own desires. And when desire is conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it brings forth death. The point here is just to say that Adam, his response is to direct the blame for his sin on both God and his wife.

And then Eve, Eve seeks to direct the blame for her sin on the serpent. So the Lord, when He looks at the woman, He says, what is this that you have done? The woman responds to Him by saying, the serpent deceived me, and therefore I ate.

And we know that there is some truth to this, certainly. There is some truth to the reality that the woman was, in fact, deceived by the serpent. In fact, in 1 Timothy 2, this is presented as a reason why women are not allowed to be pastors, be teachers, official teachers in the church.

And the reason why is because Adam was equipped for the job, he was formed first, and then the woman also, being deceived, fell into transgression. And this is presented to us as evidence for the fact that women are not qualified to be teachers in the same way.

But here's the point. How did the first parent's blame shift? Adam seeks to direct the blame for his sin on God and his wife, and Eve seeks to direct the blame for her sin on the serpent. Now, how do we think about blame shifting?

Well, blame shifting, it's a very common problem. As I've said before, everything you see in Genesis, everything you see in these sections are supposed to tell you something about the basic human condition.

These are not just random stories. So Adam and Eve's response to their confrontation by God, this is not just something they did.

Right?

It's not just something they did. These passages are not given to us by God just simply to scratch your curiosity, to fill you in on some details of the story that you might want to know for no reason whatsoever.

These things are written to us for examples because this really is a common problem. In many ways, brothers and sisters, this is our most basic response to confrontation. Particularly when you're in a situation where you're confronted, there's no escape, there's no way to deny it.

You're caught red-handed, you're caught in the act. When you've exhausted all other options, blame shifting is the go-to move. As I said, it's a very common problem. It's a common problem in marriages.

It's a joke as a counselor that if you are going to counsel a couple, and they come into counseling, and you ask them about the problem, like, what is your problem? I have a list of questions I ask people in general when they're coming to counseling.

First is, what is your problem? What have you done about it? Then, what are you expecting from me? Those three questions. You ask them. People come in for marriage counseling, you ask them, what is your problem?

The man's going to point to the wife if it's marriage counseling, and he's going to say, it's her, right? It's her. The woman is going to point to the husband and say, the problem is him. Both of them are looking at you and basically trying to persuade you.

This is what happens in most counseling. Most of them are looking at you, trying to persuade you that if you can fix the other person, that everything in their life would be all right. One of the things I try to do in those scenarios is I try to ask them to give me percentages.

I'll look at the husband and say, what percentage of the problems do you think are your wife? If they're being remotely reasonable, they'll normally try to say something like 60 -40. Like it's 60 her fault, 40 my fault.

You know that they're just saying that just because they know that they can't say what they really think. What they really think is, yeah, you know what? I think it's like 95 her and 5 me. They want to try to put it in a reasonable way.

There are sometimes where you ask the husband, you ask the wife, you look at the wife, you say, hey, what percentage of this problem is you? She's looking at you and she's saying, this is basically 95.

I know I'm a sinner, 1 maybe, but it's 99 him. It's 95 him. That's what we're here to talk about. What are your expectations for counseling? I need you to fix him. That's what I need you to do. This is a common problem in marriages.

If you try to help people deal with their marriage problems, standing in length of time, you'll realize that this is the basic posture people take when they come into counseling. It's obviously a common problem for children if you've ever had a child before.

You realize that if one child punches another one in the face, you ask them, why did you.

Do that?

Why did you punch them in the face? What do you think they're going to say? I'm a sinner. I'm a sinner and I have anger problems that I need to deal with. I need Jesus to fix my sinfully angry heart because when people don't behave in the way I want them to behave, I in unrighteousness strike out against them in anger and I need forgiveness and I need help to turn from this grievous wickedness.

Is that what they say?

No.

Why did you punch them? Well, they're going to give you a list of all the things that the other child did which try to justify the act and make it reasonable and make it understandable. You know that that's their temptation.

That's exactly what they're going to do. That's the currency they speak. That's the language they use. That's what's going to come out of their mouth and that's what comes out of their mouth almost every single time until you train them as a parent to learn to take personal responsibility for their actions and to change their wording.

That's going to keep on coming out because that's the basic human problem. As I said, I mean it's a common problem in the realm of counseling. You see people who come to counseling, you try to get them to explain.

You try to get them to explain why they're behaving in the sinful actions that they're behaving in, why they've adopted the sinful attitudes that they've adopted, why they're defined by the sinful kind of moods, feelings that they're so dominated by.

What do you think they're going to tell you? They're going to start, they expect to talk about their background, their environment, their genetics, their personality, right? All the listed disorders that they have.

It's always about their background. It's always about their environment. It's always about their genetics. It's going to be about their personality in some way. You see I can't go to church because I'm an introvert.

I have social anxiety disorder. I have a difficult time relating to members of the opposite sex because of my background. You're obviously living in a society right now where the rates of fatherless children are on the rise.

My parents weren't good parents. Why don't you excel at being a homemaker? Well, you see, mom never taught me how to cook. Mom never taught me how to clean. Mom never taught me how to meal plan. Mom never taught me discipline.

Why do you view women the way that you view them? Well, because dad wasn't there, raised by my mom. Do these things matter? Certainly, the past is influential. It's not determinative. Certainly, your background is important.

Certainly, good parents can give kids a better start in life. Isn't that true? Good parents can give children a better start in life. Certainly, if you take away the basic building block for society that God has established in the home, normal two-parent household, father and a mother, take away one of those elements, certainly, will there be fallout?

Will there be problems? Sure. The problem is that as individuals, we speak the language of victimization at almost every single point. If there's anything that we're doing that's irresponsible, we will lean on these explanations as if they are the most determinative explanations that we can have.

We don't think to put our problems in the language of biblical language, in the language of spiritual problems. We lean on these other problems, and we create in ourself a permanent posture of victimization.

So, if you ask someone why they're behaving in the behavior they are engaging in, they're going to tell you it's about their background. They're going to talk a lot about their environment. They're going to talk about their genetics, their genetic predisposition towards alcoholism.

They're going to talk about their personality, all their disorders, their phobias. We won't use the language of sin. It's a common problem in marriages. It's a common problem in children. It's a common problem in the realm of counseling.

It's a common problem in the realm of sociology, isn't it? You think about the fatherless generation, the statistics that people give in order to explain basic features of reality. I mean, certainly, yeah, if you look at the stats on it, you look at the stats, you'll realize that the single most determining factor for whether or not a child will adopt the Christian faith is the presence of a father in the home, not just a father in the home, but a father in the home that the child would describe themselves as having a close relationship.

With.

So in that case, there's a high likelihood that that child will embrace the faith when they're older. You take that out of the equation, and it's almost a mathematical certainty that they're going to be gone.

There's a generation of pastors who are apt to quote these statistics to us, and certainly, yeah, there's something there, isn't there? God has appointed means to accomplish His ends. He has designed the father to play a pivotal role in the life of family to the extent to which a father is saying, as for me, my house will serve the Lord.

God typically blesses that for sure, but He doesn't always bless that, and the reality is that very quickly this can be a source of blame shifting, particularly for an individual who doesn't have that father in his life.

Right now, you're seeing a lot of generational clashes that happen related to the younger generations, and boomers seem to be a target of almost all societal ills at this point. So if you listen to much discussion as it relates to the nature of a lot of the problems that we see today, you'll see that boomers are frequently, that word itself is frequently used as a pejorative, and it's used to describe a certain kind of generation of very self-focused, narcissistic parents who really didn't take it upon themselves to provide all the basic things that their children need, really don't want to be an active part of their life, and really created a lot of the societal problems that we see today.

As I said, I mean, so many of our problems today are blamed in a simplistic way on boomers, and if you try to push back on the kind of person who's blaming all the problems in their life on boomers, what you're going to find is they're going to quickly look at you and say that you must either be boomer or boomer-coded.

The point here is there's a lot of young generation today. If you try to encourage them towards basic responsibility, they're quickly going to blame shift all their problems on past generations, and certainly, yeah, you can look at society right now, and you can see that it's a mess.

It's a mess.

The idea that all the opportunities that were available to former generations are available to us in equal measure now is probably not true. Certainly, it's a lot harder to start out life, build a family, pay for it, than it was in former generations.

Certainly, when you're living in a time with rapid inflation, that creates a series of problems. It makes it harder to start out a home. It makes it harder to maintain a home, but the point here is just to say that in the world today, there's a lot of explanations for why we, as individuals, are not taking responsible steps in the way that former generations have, and it's very easy to blame all that on generational divides.

It's obviously a common problem in the realm of social justice as well. If you adopt a mindset that says that you, by nature of your skin color, are inherently oppressed, you can justify any manner of social evils.

One of the things that's odd about living in this time and place, like in this location in the globe, over against where we came from, is that it's odd to go to the grocery stores and see that you go through certain aisles, and they're all locked.

You have to call associates to come and give you basic things like razors, dish soap, laundry detergent. It's all locked up. You go to Walmart, and you have to call someone and ask them, can you open the door for me?

Certainly, a lot of that is the product of the social justice movement, which has divided the world up into oppressors and the oppressed class of people. Basically, if you're an oppressed class of people, then you blame all of your problems on the oppressors.

You're certainly living in a society right now that's encouraging you to adopt all these labels of victimization. A lot of them are related to perceived minority classes. If you're a woman, you're oppressed by definition, because you're a woman.

If you're a black person, you're oppressed by definition, because you're black. If you fall into any of the sexually deviant categories, you're oppressed by definition of the oppressors. The world's divided up into oppressor and oppressed class of people.

Then you get more victim points if you add up various labels of oppression. If you're a black woman, you're really oppressed. If you're a black lesbian woman, man, there you go. If you want to win the contest of being the biggest victim, you can do it as a man.

All you have to do is just pretend to be a woman. If you're a black man who pretended to be a woman, then you've reached the apex of victimization. Then that will allow you to blame shift basically everything that happens in your life.

If you experience all the guilt and shame and condemnation that comes from pretending to be a gender that you aren't, you go get surgery and try to deal with that problem. You deal with that problem. You wake up and you look in the mirror and you realize that you tried to make yourself be a woman, but you weren't.

Now you've destroyed your life. You've destroyed your possibility of posterity. You've destroyed your future. Then you go and you commit suicide. You're living in a society right now who's going to view that as an act of oppression that happened to you.

You're not going to view the person who commits suicide as the villain in the story. You're going to view them through the lens of these victimization categories. They're the person who was bullied into taking this act.

Obviously, that's a failure of the church to love and affirm these people and everything else. The point here is to say that you're living in a world that is filled with blame shifting. It's a common problem in our marriages.

It's a common problem in children. It is a common problem in counseling. It's common in the realm of sociology. It's common in the realm of social justice, which is neither social nor justice. What do we do about this?

Jesus Christ, the Cross, and the End of Blame Shifting

Well, Jesus provides a solution to blame shifting. Jesus provides a solution to blame shifting.

Why?

Well, first, Jesus didn't blame shift. Jesus never blame shifted.

Why?

Well, he never did anything blame worthy. So, Jesus never did anything blame worthy. 1 John 3, 5 tells us, you know that he appeared in order to take away sins and in him there is no sin. Jesus was the only human being throughout all the history of the world who's never engaged in blame shifting.

And the reason why is he's never engaged in the sin of blame shifting is because he never did anything blame worthy. Unlike us, he didn't have a flawed human nature that tempted him towards evil. So, he never had to live in the reality of being a sinful human who's done something wrong and is now trying to figure out how to respond to it.

So, Jesus never sinned. He never had the temptation to try to mask his sin. He never had the temptation to try to blame his sin on someone else. He never had the temptation to try to deflect his sin onto anyone.

Jesus was perfect. Jesus never blame shifted. And certainly, we are encouraged to follow his example in that. Is the cross an act of blame shifting? I mean, yes and no.

No.

No, mostly, but you know, if you want to do funny things with words and instead of sticking to the plain meaning of blame shifting that I've already described, you want to stick to the etymology of these words, then sure, there's a sense in which the cross is an example of blame, i .e., the consequences of sin being reassigned or shifted from the innocent person, or from the guilty people to the innocent person.

So certainly, there's some shifting of blame that happens under some kind of definition. But in the strict sense, no. And stronger than that, absolutely not no. In the strict sense of the terms, the cross is not an example of blame shifting.

So Jesus, he voluntarily accepted the punishment for our sins. Sins that he did not commit, right? Yet, he doesn't accept the blame for them in the sense of moral culpability or personal guilt. So Jesus is not basically letting us get off the hook and giving us an out in that way.

We've committed sins that are real sins that we actually committed. Jesus in the cross is not letting us basically say that we didn't commit those sins, but that he actually committed them and therefore he deserves to be punished for them.

That's not the way the cross works. So it's not an example of sinful people manipulatively trying to assign their guilt onto someone else or something else instead of taking personal responsibility for it.

The issue is the cross is an example of justice and mercy at the same time. It's just in that we are sinners who have violated God's standards. And we are rightfully judged for our actions. Jesus is not being forced against his will to take responsibility for our sin.

In other words, pretend that he committed our sin instead of us. That's not really what's happening at all. He's voluntarily deciding to lay down his life as a free gift to pay for our sins. So the cross is not an example of blame shifting in that sense.

1 Peter 2, 24 says, He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds we are healed. The cross is an example of Jesus coming to earth, doing for us what we couldn't do.

In many ways it really is the opposite posture that a person with blame shifting would take. So in some sense there's an opposite to blame shifting that's happening. Where when we commit a sin and we're caught in the act, we have temptations to respond exactly the way Adam and Eve respond.