More Consequences of Sin

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We're making it a two-part lesson because I didn't finish everything last week.
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But, if you were not here last week, I do have the handout.
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So, is there anyone who needs that? Okay.
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Dale, would you mind? I'll just give these to you and you'll hand them to whoever we need.
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As we know, this is Hamartiology, which is the study of the doctrine of sin, which the Greek word for sin is hamartia, and most of our subsets of systematic theology are broken down by their Greek word.
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And so, Hamartiology is the study of sin.
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As Brother Andy mentioned in his teaching on Psalm 119, sin means to miss the mark.
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And that's what we learned in our first lesson.
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If you see the outline on the handout, it says that the...
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Here, Brother, you have the wrong one.
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No, I've got the other one.
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The nature of sin was the first one that we looked at, and we said that sin is defined by God.
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Because God is the standard of righteousness.
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Anything that does not meet His standard is sin.
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That's part one.
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Part two was the problem of sin and the origin of sin.
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And we talked about the fact that the problem of sin is the question of why did God allow it to happen.
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And we talked about that in lesson two.
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And then we moved last week into the third part, the consequences of sin.
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And we addressed the first of four.
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On your list there are four, actually there are five consequences.
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And we addressed the first one last week, which is that sin affects our relationship with God.
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It affects the relationship between man and God.
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And I got to thinking after that lesson, I should have given you this illustration last week, but I didn't.
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And it departed my mind, I guess.
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If you don't know how to share the Gospel with someone, a very simple way to remember is to learn the acronym GOSPEL.
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And you've heard me do this, I think some of you have.
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I do this with our karate class, this is one of the things they memorize.
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But G-O-S-P-E-L, God created us in His image, our sin separates us from Him.
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Sin cannot be repaid by good works.
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Paying the price for sin, Jesus died and rose again.
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Everyone who trusts in Him alone will have life forever.
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And life forever is with Jesus in Heaven.
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Now I don't expect you to write that down, Dan, I see you pulled your pen out.
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I'll give it to you later, because it's a lot to write.
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I was about to say, slow down.
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But my only point in bringing that up is the second, the O, our sin separates us from God.
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And that is a truth that we see in Scripture.
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Isaiah said, your iniquities have separated you from God.
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And so the relationship is divided, it's severed, it's separated by sin.
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And so that's what we looked at last week.
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The first consequence of sin is that there is a ruining of the relationship between man and God.
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That relationship which walked in the garden without any division, without any separation, was ruined in the fall.
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Well, we're going to move on tonight and look at the four other ones.
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I think we have plenty of time.
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We should be able to go through all four of the other consequences.
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We may even get out a little early.
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Lord willing, I know you'd be so excited if you got a few minutes early.
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So number two is the effect on the human nature.
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Henry Thiessen says this in his Systematic Theology.
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When Adam and Eve came from the hand of the Creator, they were not only innocent, but also holy.
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They had no sinful nature.
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Now, they had a sense of shame, degradation, and pollution.
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This is after the fall.
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Before the fall, they were holy and they had no sin nature.
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Now, after the fall, they have a sense of shame, degradation, and pollution.
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There was something to hide.
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They were naked.
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They could not appear before God in their fallen condition.
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And it was this sense of unfitness that led them to make for themselves aprons of fig leaves.
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And that's Genesis 3 and verse 7.
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They were not only ashamed to appear before God in their new condition, they were also ashamed to appear before one another.
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Which is why they made clothing.
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They were morally ruined.
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Morally ruined.
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So not only was the relationship between God and man ruined, the relationship between man and himself was ruined.
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Because prior to the fall, there was no shame.
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You ever heard somebody say, I hate myself? Have you ever said, I hate myself? Maybe not as intense as some have said.
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Some hate themselves to the point of suicide.
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Some hate themselves to the point of personal flagellation.
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They hit themselves.
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They hurt themselves.
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They cut themselves.
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And they harm themselves purposefully because of some drive within them.
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What do people who are transvestites say? I hate this body.
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I want a different body.
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I don't want to be what I am.
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I want to be what I think I should be.
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So this personal loathing, moral ruining.
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God had said to Adam, in the day that you eat of it, you will die.
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And we know, as we mentioned last week, they didn't die the very day they ate it.
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At least in the sense of physical death.
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But they did die a spiritual death.
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And that's what we talked about.
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That was the separation from God.
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But also, they died in a sense physically because they began to die.
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Where their bodies prior to this were not subject to the wearing out that is natural of man, their bodies and their nature would now begin to wear out.
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Now I don't want to go too far because that's actually the next part, the effect on the human body.
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But his constitution, his nature changed.
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He went from being one who was at one with God to one who was now a slave of sin.
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He was constituted sinner.
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And one of the most profound effects this had was on his reason and his will.
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Sin causes spiritual deadness and an inability to seek after the things of God.
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We're going to learn more about this in part 5, I think.
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Which one is the bondage of the will? Part 5.
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When we look at the bondage of the will, I didn't put that under the consequences of sin, but really everything we're going to talk about from here on is really the consequences of sin.
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The bondage of the will is going to require an entire lesson on its own.
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But for the sake of this, the effect on the human nature is not only is he morally ruined, but he's also mentally and reasonably ruined.
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Yes, sir.
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I think one of the effects of the human nature is you don't have to teach.
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That's right.
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They'll do it automatically.
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That's right.
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Anybody will.
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No, I know what you're saying, though.
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Even as young as three or two.
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Absolutely.
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They'll hide something.
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They'll hide themselves.
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They'll hide what they did.
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And you don't have to teach them how to do that.
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Yeah, it's like the old comedian said one time.
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He said, you know, see the kid getting the cookie? And he says, what are you doing? I told you you can't have that.
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He goes, I'm getting it for you.
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You're a liar.
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But yes, that's absolutely true.
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And that's why I say it affects his reason, it affects his desires.
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There's a word that I've used in the past that I want to remind you of.
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I'm going to trade to my side of the board.
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Andy and I share so well.
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Oh, I've got to erase this.
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Hold on.
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All right.
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This is an important word.
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And if you haven't heard it, you haven't been here maybe in our previous classes.
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It's called the noetic effect of the fall.
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The noetic effect comes from the Greek word nous.
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That's where we get the idea of the noetic effect.
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And the Greek word nous means mind.
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So really, it's the effect on the mind.
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And the verse that I would point you to on this one particularly would be 1 Corinthians 2 and verse 14.
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The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
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The natural man, natural person, does not accept the things of God.
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This doesn't say some natural men don't.
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This says the natural person, the natural man.
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This is referring to everyone in the natural state.
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They do not accept the things of the Spirit of God.
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Why? Because there has been an effect.
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Sin has affected their nature.
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And part of their nature is their reasoning capabilities.
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And their reasoning capabilities have been eschewed by sin.
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This is why, as intelligent as an atheist can be, and there are some wildly intelligent men who do not believe in God and who reject Jesus Christ as their Savior.
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In their heightened intelligence, they are demonstrating that they are made in the image of God, what we've been talking about on Sunday morning.
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They demonstrate they're made in the image of God by being able to do the math problems they can do, by being able to figure out the formulas they can do, by being able to...
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I mean, the very fact that we have air conditioning is because somebody was a genius.
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I don't know if he was a believer or not, but he was blessed with God.
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But the point of it is, he blessed me through that man.
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The point of it is, in the image of God, he created him and he's expressing that image by this intelligence, but his intelligence is askew because of his denial of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And so, as smart as a man might be, if he is an atheist, all of his intelligence has a slant to it, an offness to it.
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Yes.
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Yeah, and that's what the text says.
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It says they're spiritually discerned.
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The spiritually dead person cannot receive the things of God.
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Now, it doesn't necessarily mean, and I talked about this in my hermeneutics class, it doesn't necessarily mean that they won't understand it in the sense of, like, they can read, so they understand nouns and verbs and pronouns and adjectives.
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Sometimes unbelievers know more facts about the Bible than believers do.
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But what the text is saying is they do not accept the things of the Spirit of God.
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So even though they might know the facts, and they might be able to win a game of Jeopardy if the subject were Bible trivia, they can't accept the truth of those things.
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I would say someone like Bart Ehrman, I wish I knew all that Bart Ehrman knows about the Greek language and about the original texts of the Scripture.
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He spent his whole life dedicated to learning those things.
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And he's a brilliant scholar, but he's lost as a goose.
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And his intelligence is skewed.
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Because there is a missing component, that spiritual component that's not there, and that's that effect on the human nature.
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The natural man cannot accept, cannot receive, I think it's what it says in the King James, cannot receive the things of God.
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It takes me back to John 1.
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Jesus came unto His own, and His own received Him not.
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But to as many as did receive Him, He gave them the power to become the children of God.
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That receiving, it's not they can't know it, it's taking it from here to here.
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We've always talked about that gap between the head and the heart.
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It'll never make it from here to here.
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And it'll never make a difference in their life until the Holy Spirit of God changes their heart.
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So yes, the person who's reading with spiritual eyes will not only understand it better, but will be able to see how this Christ didn't just die on a Roman cross, He died for me on a Roman cross.
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And that changes everything.
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So yes, absolutely.
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So that's the effect on the human nature.
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Now let's look at the effect on the human body.
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Looking back at Henry Thiessen for a moment, he said this, When God said that for disobedience man would surely die, He included the body.
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Immediately after the trespass, God said to Adam, You are dust, and to dust shall you return.
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That's Genesis 3, 19.
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That was the condemnation.
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You came from the dust, and to the dust you shall return.
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Isn't that the reality? None of us, save the Lord, returns.
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None of us will cheat death.
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And none of us will have our bodies be anything except going back to the dust.
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And it's a result of sin.
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Death, you know, I talk about, I do funerals a lot.
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I know I do funerals a lot.
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And I think about this every time.
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I got a funeral Friday.
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And I think about this.
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This is the consequence of sin.
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And I know what we've tried to do, and forgive me, if this offends you, just know that it's not intended to offend.
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I don't walk around just looking for ways to make people upset.
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But I want to say something.
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Nobody wants a funeral anymore.
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Everybody wants a life celebration.
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Nobody wants a funeral.
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They want a celebration of life.
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And when I go and do funerals for folks, I don't argue language like that.
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It's not valued.
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To me, it's nothing.
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But the reality is, I understand what they're trying to do.
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They're trying to throw a cloak over the idea of death and make it something better than it is.
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Death is bad.
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It's supposed to be bad.
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It's a consequence of sin.
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Now for the believer, death is not from life to death, it's from life to life.
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So we can do a celebration of their home going or whatever you want to call it.
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But the very fact that the body died is another reminder that sin has consequences.
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We experience this even as believers.
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We experience the consequence of sin because we all die.
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And like I said, if you call it home going service or whatever, I'm not going to argue with you.
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For me, it's a reminder of sin.
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A funeral.
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It's a reminder of the reality, a reminder of the consequence.
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It's a reminder of the fact that Adam sinned and I sinned in Adam.
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And as my federal head he died or he sinned in my place and I died because of him.
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But I also died because of my sins as well.
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I inherit his sin nature but I also don't fancy myself any better than him because I know if I were in his place I would have done the same thing.
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That's the real burden is to know that I'm no better than Adam.
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Why can Adam represent me? Because I would have done the same.
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So with that being said, I want to mention something.
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You might have heard me use the term Pelagian before.
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If you've never heard that word, P-E-L-A-G-I-A-N, the term Pelagian refers to a system of theological thought that was developed by...
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I refer to him as the arch-heretic Pelagius but we can just call him Pelagius for now.
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Pelagius was a heretic in the late 4th and early 5th century.
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He was a contemporary of Augustine.
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Augustine, Richard, I know what you...
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I read about him today.
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Huh? I read about him today.
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Did you read about him today? Pelagius believed that death was always part of the plan of God and that death, physical death, was not the by-product of sin but that God's plan was always for man to live and to die and to go to heaven.
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What changed in Pelagius' mind was that man now lives and dies and has the potential to go to hell.
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You understand where his point was? He was saying prior to the fall, if man would have lived, he would have died and he would have went to heaven.
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And after the fall, man now lives and dies and he'll either go to heaven if he's redeemed or he'll go to hell if he's not.
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But his point was that death is not a result of sin.
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I'll read from Millard Erickson.
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This is another theologian.
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He said this, "...physical death in the Pelagian view is a natural accompaniment of being human.
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The biblical references to death as a consequence of sin are understood as a reference, yes, to spiritual death, separation from God, rather than physical death." So what Erickson is saying is Pelagius' view and those who hold to the Pelagian view would say that we die as a natural thing.
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Death is natural.
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Now, you may not agree with Pelagius, but you know people who do because you've heard people say, oh, death is natural.
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We shouldn't fear death.
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We shouldn't worry about death.
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We shouldn't hurt about death because death is natural.
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It's all part of life.
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Right? You've heard people say that? That's Pelagian.
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That ain't Christian.
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Because Christian says death is an aberration of what God's plan and God's established work in the garden was.
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It was brought into the garden as a result of sin.
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It was not part of the design.
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Now, we could talk about sovereignty and all that.
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I don't want to mess up the understanding of God, knowing and planning things out.
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But the point of the matter is the idea that Adam would have died had he not sinned.
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I can't find that in Scripture.
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And that's the point.
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Pelagius is arguing Adam would have died regardless.
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Here's their justification.
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Here's the justification.
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And I'll give it to you because, again, Pelagius wasn't a stupid person.
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I mean, he's known 1,600 years later because he was intelligent, not because he was an idiot.
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Right? And here was Pelagius' argument.
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He said Jesus died and Jesus never sinned.
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Therefore, death is not the consequence of sin.
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And that's a pretty good syllogism.
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Jesus never sinned.
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Jesus died.
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Therefore, death is not the consequence of sin.
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But there's a problem with that argument.
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And it's found in John 10.18.
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Jesus said this in John 10.18.
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No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down on my own accord.
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I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again.
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Jesus didn't die like we die.
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Jesus said, It is finished.
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Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.
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And he gave up the ghost.
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Guess what? You don't get to give up the ghost.
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You don't get to choose the moment you die.
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Now, I do think, and I want to be careful how I say this, I do think there are people who tend to hold out longer for something.
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I've seen it happen where people are holding out, and it's almost like they willed themselves to live an extra hour because their child was coming or something.
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And so you might want to argue that person held out longer.
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But it's all in the sovereign hand of God, one thing.
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And two, you can't choose your death.
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But Jesus gave up the ghost.
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He said, No man takes my life from me, but I lay it down on my own accord.
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And Jesus took our sin for us.
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He became sin who knew no sin.
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And in that died He who shouldn't have died because He was sinless.
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He who didn't deserve to die because He was faultless.
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He who didn't need to die because He was divine, chose to die because we desperately needed a substitute to die in our place.
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So for Pelagius to say, Christ's death proves that death is natural because Christ never sinned is to, I think, corrupt the very understanding of who Christ is and understanding the very nature of His death.
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Christ didn't die as a result of His own sin.
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Christ died for the sins of everyone who would ever believe on Him.
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We're going to learn more about Pelagius when we talk about human will because not only does Pelagius not believe in original sin, which we're going to talk about next week or in a couple of weeks, not only does he not believe in original sin, not only does he not believe that death is unnatural and caused by sin, but he also didn't believe that we are slaves to sin until God saves us.
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He believed we have a perfect libertarian free will.
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And that's where he ran up against Augustine.
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And Augustine won the day theologically because Pelagius was not coming from a biblical perspective.
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And when we get to the bondage of the will, we'll look more at that.
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But not only is death a result and consequence of sin, but also physical illness is a result of sin.
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From the moment the man ate the forbidden tree, he became a dying creature, corruption was introduced on that very occasion, and the pains which both man and woman would suffer grew out of that one act of apostasy.
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Genesis 2.17 in Hebrew says, Dying you shall die.
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And the idea of that is that from the moment you eat of this, you will begin to die.
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You will begin to die.
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All sickness is a result of sin.
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Now I say that with a very quick caveat.
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If you are sick, let's say you have a terrible disease.
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That terrible disease is not necessarily a result of some sin that you did in your life to deserve it.
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And we know that by looking at several texts of the Bible.
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Job had all kinds of terrible tragedy befall him both externally and in his physical body to the point where his wife said, You should just curse God and die.
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What a woman.
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That's right.
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I've already got boils on my body, now I have one on my heart.
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But you've got Job who suffered, and he cried out to God, God why? And the questions were coming, and he had the friends who were not good counselors, and finally God.
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The answer in Job is really, I know unbelievers wouldn't find it satisfying, and some believers have trouble finding it satisfying, but the answer in Job is, I'm God.
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Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? You can't even put a hook in the nose of Leviathan.
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Who are you? It goes right along with Romans 9, Who are you old man to answer back to God? We don't like that, but at the same time, this to me is a reminder that when I see somebody suffering a great tragedy, it doesn't always mean that they did something.
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For instance, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, and I was asked, was that a result of the fact that they had casinos? And my answer was kind of simple.
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I said, well, I don't think that it was a direct attack against the casinos, I said because the hurricane would have also maybe made its way over to Nevada, to Las Vegas.
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But also, the other problem is, there were just as many churches as casinos that were destroyed in that flood.
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And Katrina killed believers as well as unbelievers.
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So, can we talk about the fact that all destruction is a result of sin? But when you start pointing to specific things, I remember there was a massive tsunami hit, was it India or somewhere? And many, many people died, and people said, oh, it was because they're Hindus.
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Yeah, and people came out, it was because they're Hindus.
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I mean, this is the way we think, because we always want to describe some kind of immediate consequence to the sin, rather than stepping back and saying all bad, all things are ultimately a result of sin.
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But if you want to put this in your mind, Luke 13 changed my heart when I first really understood it, and I'm still understanding it to this day, but Luke 13, they came to Jesus and they said, a tower fell on some people.
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And Jesus said, do you think that tower fell on them because they're worse than you? Unless you repent, you will likewise perish.
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That's a powerful thought.
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We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
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We all deserve anything that we get, except grace.
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We don't deserve grace, and that's why it is grace.
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I was just thinking about generational sin.
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You know, how somewhere along the line it just came into my mind.
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Of course it's all generational because it all came from Adam.
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Yeah.
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And yeah, I mean, there are things that certainly, economic situations and drug situations and things that parents pass on to children and things like that, and it is all a result of sin.
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And I'm not saying there aren't immediate consequences.
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I know, well, let's be careful what I'm about to say.
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I know two pastors specifically who fell from their position as pastors.
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Both of them did evil in the eyes of God, and both of them within a year, their wife died.
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Now, I am not for a second saying that their wife suffered the consequence from God of their sin.
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But man, it's just amazing that two men that I know specifically that happened.
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And both of them were men of God who were preaching the Word of God, held up with high esteem.
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And when they fell, they fell hard.
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And both of them within a year, after falling, lost their wives.
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I mean, like I said, it's a scary thing.
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But I'm not negating everything I just said.
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It is scary to think sometimes that sin does have and can have immediate consequences.
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And there are consequences built into sin.
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You know, if you drink all your life and you get liver disease, that's a consequence that's built in to that sin.
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If you smoke and you get cancer of the lungs or whatever, that's a consequence that's built in to the sin.
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It's almost like it's natural.
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It's a bearing of the consequence of that sin.
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But the amazing thing is there are people who smoke all their whole life, and they die at 110 years old.
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So at the same time, it's not an always thing.
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I think I've gone far enough on this one.
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And the point is sin affects us physically.
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It affects our natural bodies.
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It affects our minds.
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It also has affected our environment.
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It has affected our environment.
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Genesis 3, 17 to 19, Cursed is the ground because of you in toil you shall eat of it.
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All the days of your life, both thorns and thistles, it shall grow for you.
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And you shall eat the plants of the field.
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By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.
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This tells us that inanimate nature suffered as a result of man's sin.
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Genesis 3, 14, When the serpent is cursed, it says, More than all cattle and more than every beast of the field.
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So there's a curse that's even on the animals.
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I cannot prove this.
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But I do believe that prior to the fall, animals and man did not eat other animals.
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Because I don't believe there was animal death prior to the fall.
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I've said this on Sunday morning, so this shouldn't be anything new or surprising.
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Because it's one of the reasons why I believe in the young earth and those things.
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It's kind of part of that belief.
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I don't believe animals died prior to the fall.
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No, just that.
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I don't believe animals died before the fall, which means animals didn't eat animals.
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And I think part of the fall was a change in the way that animals behaved.
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And the idea of predators and things like that, I think was a change in the natural order of the fall.
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And I'm going to read this in a couple of weeks in Genesis 1, where it says, I've given to all of the beasts and to man every green tree, every fruit, every green tree to eat.
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It's in Genesis 1.
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The idea of eating carnivorously is a result of the fall.
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Now that doesn't make it sinful.
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Because later God would use meat of animals as sacrifices.
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And the feasts would include the lambs and cattle.
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So I'm not saying eating meat is sinful.
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What I'm saying is it wasn't happening prior to the fall.
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And so the curse that befell the nature around us affected we have bushes with thorns and all these things that are new and different, and we have animals that now want to kill each other and want to kill us.
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You know the most dangerous animal, according to statistics, kills more people every year than any other animal? A lot of people would think it would be a shark or an alligator.
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Hippopotamus.
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Hippopotamuses kill people.
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Everybody who lives over in Africa.
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They turn boats over.
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They drown people.
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They eat them.
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They're a dangerous animal.
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You think they're the big beautiful regal animal, go to the zoo and look at them.
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They're a very dangerous animal.
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What about snakes? Oh, I hate snakes.
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I know you do, but God changed their nature too because look at the snake in the garden.
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Yeah, and I talked about this last week.
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Were you here last week when I mentioned this? No, it's okay.
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But I did say this.
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I said I'm not even sure snakes look like they did prior to the fall because I'm not sure they crawled prior to the fall on their bellies.
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There are some who believe that snakes were actually more upright.
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Some even believe they had arms and legs.
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That taking that away was part of the fall because it says from now on you're going to eat dust.
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You're going to crawl on your belly.
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It was a part of the fall.
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But, again, I can't prove that.
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I don't know what it looked like prior to the fall.
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But, yeah, no, I think that the almost universal hatred of snakes is part and parcel of the fact that God cursed them above all other livestock.
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I mean nobody, well, there are a few weird people, Simon, who like snakes.
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And my son JJ loves snakes in the zoo.
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I won't even go in there with them.
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I'll make Jennifer go in there with them in the zoo snake house.
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But, yeah, no, snakes are for sure.
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There's almost a universal hatred among men.
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But to finalize this point, there's been an effect on the environment.
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The environment was decidedly changed because of sin.
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But the Bible also says there's going to be a time where the environment will be restored in the new heavens and the new earth.
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And that's another thing that makes me think about what it's going to be like.
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It says the lion will lay down with the lamb.
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It says the wolf will eat grass like the ox.
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And the child will lead them.
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That there's not going to be a predatory mindset in the new heavens.
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There's not going to be a carnivorous mindset in the new heavens.
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Predatory, carnivorous will not exist then, and it exists now as a result of the fall.
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Alright, last thing, and I'll draw it so close.
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Didn't get out early, sorry.
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Without doubt, the most dramatic effect that sin brings is in regard to our eternal state.
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Because of sin, our relationship with God, our spirit, and our body, and even our environment has been corrupted.
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And the end of this is eternal death unless we are redeemed.
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Eternal death does not mean that we vanish into non-existence.
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We don't just simply disappear.
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But it refers to eternal conscious torment in a place called hell.
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And that is the ultimate consequence of sin.
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Sin has consequences in this life.
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Sin has greater consequences in the life to come.
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Now when we get to eschatology, which is the study of the last things, the study of the end times, we're going to look more at the doctrine of hell.
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But for now, let me just say this, there is no greater consequence to our sin than the consequence of an eternity spent under the wrath of Almighty God.
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And therefore, if there is no other reason to flee from sin, and to pursue Christ, and to trust in Him, it is that we have a consequence that we cannot and we must not ignore.
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And that is the consequence that if we die in our sins, we will suffer for it forever.
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A lot of people don't believe in hell.
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I can't imagine it.
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But I can't deny it.
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I pray for all of you.
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I pray that in the mercy of God, that you would know Christ tonight, and that you would not be subject to the wrath to come.
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But the only way for that is to be in Christ.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank You for this opportunity to study together.
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I thank You especially for Your Word, which reminds us so much of our desperation apart from Christ.
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Oh Lord, sin has borne its consequences in us, and we're going to see even more of those consequences in the weeks to come.
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But Lord, I pray that You would keep us focused in our studies, not just to puff us up doctrinally, but to align us more rightly with what Your Word has to teach us.
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Thank You for those who come out tonight.
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Thank You for those who are listening to us online.
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And Lord, I pray that You would draw those who are not yet Yours to Yourself.
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In Christ's name, amen.