Neverland Makes You Forget

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Let's pray. Lord God, as we open up your word, we again thank you for the saving message that is found there.

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As we look now in the book of Genesis and ponder the problems that have been created by sin and the solution, which is you crucified for our sins, may you continue to strengthen our faith and preserve us to life everlasting.

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To the glory of your name we ask in Jesus' name, amen. All right, we are in Genesis 3, and we're going to go in a couple of different directions today.

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We'll do a little bit of typology, and there's a reason why I do the typology thing, because I find it absolutely fascinating.

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When you start seeing how all the different typological pieces start to fit together, you wonder, how did

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I miss this? Where's Janet? There's Janet. Yeah. I don't know.

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You didn't get my question answered, did you? Which one? Which one? You said I had one.

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What was your last question that I didn't answer? I remember. Oh, the why question. Yeah.

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Why was the tree of good and evil? Why was the good there? And why couldn't they eat it then if it was good there?

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That was my question. Yeah, it was the why question, but see, we come back to my answer, and that's this, is that Christians are not to be speculative theologians.

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You start getting in all kinds of trouble theologically when you start speculating. Well, I've got a bunch more questions if you want to answer.

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Okay, all right. Okay. So if I don't have a text that tells me why, I can't tell you why.

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I've got some questions. Okay. And they're very much encouraged. Okay. So our text this morning is

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Genesis 3. There'll be a little bit of review. We covered part of this last week. Genesis 3, verse 1. Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the

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Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say, did

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God really say that you must not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, well, we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat the fruit that's in the tree in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it or you will die.

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That's not accurate. God did not say you can't touch it, he says you can't eat it. So you can see that already this deconstructing question, by the way, someone who says, oh,

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I'm just asking questions, questions can actually be dangerous. They can be used as a weapon.

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And I think back to the early days of my marriage. My wife would never actually give me direct orders.

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She would always ask questions. And the questions would go like, you're going to mow the lawn today, aren't you? You see, that's not, that's not, she's not trying to get information.

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I learned that really early on. Questions have power. And in this particular case, when he's saying, did

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God really say, he's causing Adam and Eve to doubt God's goodness, basically doubt what he says.

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And see, this is the same attack that we go through over and again. This is why we come to church and we remember and hear again what

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Christ has done for us. And the reason why is because our sinful nature wars against what

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God's word says. The best way I can put it, I use this, I've used this analogy before, but I don't think I've used it here, is how many of you remember that movie called

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Hook? Does anyone see that movie? With Robin Williams. Yeah, he played Peter Pan.

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And the story goes that Peter Pan grew up. I mean, can you imagine that? I mean,

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I guess what happens after the Peter Pan book, which is really kind of a weird book by the way.

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It's kind of like reading a dream. It's really weird in its presentation. So apparently Peter Pan, he didn't fall in love with Wendy.

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He fell in love with Wendy's granddaughter. And once he fell in love with her, that convinced him to leave

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Neverland. And he came to our world and he grew up.

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And he was adopted to a family in the United States and became an attorney, which means he went to hell.

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Yeah, anyway, yes. Anyway, so he becomes an attorney, and an attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions in the corporate world.

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So he's one of these cutthroat, high -priced attorneys that doesn't give a lick about people's lives.

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It just wants money, right? But apparently back in Neverland, Captain James Hook had been nursing a grudge against that boy who had cut off his hand and fed it to the crocodile, right?

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And so he came up with this elaborate plot to create the ultimate war, right, between good and evil.

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And so Peter Pan had grown up, gotten married to Moira, Wendy's granddaughter. They have kids, and they're traveling back to England.

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And when they get there, they're at a benefit dinner, and that's when Hook springs his plan. His plan is to kidnap

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Peter Pan's kids and force him to come back to Neverland so that he can have this ultimate battle with them, right?

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See, the problem is that Peter Pan had forgotten who he was, and he just thought he was a mergers and acquisitions attorney who spent time in an orphanage.

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So after his kids are kidnapped, Tinkerbell shows up and takes him back to Neverland. And of course, he thinks he's having an

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LSD trip or something like that, and it takes some convincing to get him to remember who he is.

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While all of this is going on, I'm trying to kind of give you the long end of the story. While all of this is going on, his kids are in Neverland, and they're under house arrest by Captain James Hook.

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And Hook comes up with this plan, this ultimate really wicked evil thing. He's going to indoctrinate

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Peter Pan's kids into being pirates, okay? So he sends them to pirate school.

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And of course, his older child is his son, his younger child is his daughter, and there's some father issues going on that are earlier in the story.

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So they're in pirate school, and Hook is trying to convince these children that their parents care nothing about them, that they only give them things that they want to shut them up so that they'll go away, and things like this.

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And the little girl reacts, and she says, you're a bad man, Captain Hook, and this is not true.

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My mommy loves me, and things like this, right? But the problem is that he's saying these words to create doubt in their minds as to whether or not their parents love them.

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It's very similar. You see, this is one of the reasons why I like fairy tales, because they pick up on these themes.

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These are what are called the archetypes. And so here we've got evil trying to seduce these innocent children by causing them to doubt the love of their parents.

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Well, Pan's daughter will have nothing of it, but you can see his son is kind of coming under the pirate's sway.

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She's trying to appeal to him, you know, wake up, Jack, don't listen to these people.

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And so they end up taking this little girl like a sack of potatoes and dragging her out of the room.

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And the whole time she's being dragged out of the room, she's saying to her brother, run home, Jack, run home, run home.

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Neverland makes you forget. Neverland makes you forget. Never forget that, Jack. Neverland makes you forget.

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And you think, that's a lot like what we experience. You know, we come to church and over and again we hear these wonderful stories, but they're not stories.

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It's a story of the fall of man into sin and God's gracious love for us and rescue for us.

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And we need to hear it over and over and over again. And isn't it funny, you miss a few Sundays and what was so powerful on one

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Sunday, sitting there in your mind or in your heart, you know, a few Sundays go by and you haven't come to church and that just gets buried and pushed into the back and it's really easy to forget.

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Neverland makes you forget. And so we need to hear these stories over again. I remember when Christina was a little girl, her favorite book was

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Goodnight Moon. And she would climb up on my lap, she's got the book in her hand and say, oh, you read me a story, read me a story, okay,

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I'll read you a story. So you'd read the story about the great green room and, you know, the telephone and the red balloon and the three little bears sitting on chairs, right, and the kittens and the mittens and all that kind of stuff and the goodnight moon and you just go through the whole thing.

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And, of course, she's looking for the mouse in every little page, right. And then we get to the end of the story and she says, read it again, read it again.

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Read it again. And so we need to hear these stories again and again.

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And I like the fact that, you know, we're called to be childlike but not childish.

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You know, childlike faith says, tell me that story again about the crucified and risen Savior, the

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God who was born of the virgin, suffered and died for my sins. We need to hear this over and again. And by hearing it over again, our faith has that word to cling to and faith believes these words, believes these words because they're

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God's words. And so the devil comes along and says, do you really believe that story about a talking snake?

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Come on, really? And you realize, it's funny that you'd ask that question because that sounds a lot like the question that that serpent asked all the way back in the garden.

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Get behind me. That's what you do, right? So we believe these words. They are God's words. I have a question.

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Yes, ma 'am. So God created all the animals, including the snake. Yes, ma 'am. So at the time of creation, the snake was fine.

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He's good to go. He's one of God's creatures, just like the tiger and the lion and everything else. Yes. Then when

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Satan fell, or sinned, did God cause him to go into the snake thing?

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I don't know. Or is it this snake? I don't know. I think it's this snake in particular. Yeah. And so we don't know.

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Here's the funny thing. The book of Genesis doesn't give us the backstory. You remember, you all read the

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Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings? Okay, good stuff.

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Is there a movie? Okay. I've got work to do here. Okay. Anyways, when you read

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The Lord of the Rings, it begins with the Fellowship of the Ring, but the reality is that later he wrote the book The Hobbit, which is the backstory.

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It is a little bit confusing, and then you put them all together. So think of it this way. It's just that the book of Genesis is like the

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Fellowship of the Rings. It begins in the middle of the story. We pick up somewhere in time, but we don't have all the backstory.

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And the backstory is alluded to in parts of the Old Testament, and the pieces are a little bit tough to put together.

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We have hints and glimpses of the backstory. For instance, we know that when

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Satan fell, it was because of his pride, that he wanted to exalt himself above God.

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We know this. And that somehow in his fall, he convinced a third of the angelic host to believe his lies.

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And there was a full -blown, in the heavenlies, coup d 'etat against God the

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Father Almighty himself and against the Trinity. This is what we know. And we do know that he was sent, along with his angels, to Earth.

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We do know this. Okay. So when we talk about the demonic, that's what we're talking about, fallen angels.

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And we also know that Satan, from the time of Christ's death and resurrection, has been bound, and that at some point, if it hasn't happened already, he will be loosed and allowed to do his work in order for the purpose of deceiving the nation.

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So we know that much, but we don't know much else.

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I have a question. Yes, sir. What we're talking about here, as far as hearing it over and over and over again, do we know at the same time to tell us that?

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You can see it in everyday life.

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You know, some places in your school systems, they're trying to rewrite history.

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They're taking slight bits of, and they're saying it over and over again, and the kids come home and they say, no,

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Dad, no, Grandpa, that isn't how it is. It's like this. That's not how we learned it. You know?

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And some of this, how do we know that it isn't getting used against us?

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It's always out there. Yeah. It's the world. It's the world. The world is this way. You know, if you think of it this way, it's always easy to do bad.

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You don't have to tell your kids to do bad. It's much harder to take a higher road. Good.

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Correct? Right. So, you know, it doesn't take much. I mean, it's so much easier to believe the bad side of things than to stop things and say, no, that's not right.

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See what I'm saying? It's easier to be deceptive if you stop thinking. But it's always out there.

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Yeah. Let me say this, because I think you're talking about some of the major changes that are happening in our culture.

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And this has to do with a creeping and growing ideology that we're not familiar with, that seems very irrational and seems to be not, doesn't care, is not cognizant of historic truth and will rewrite history for its own purposes.

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That's a symptom of the problem. Does that make sense? That's a symptom of it. So we see

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Satan at work. We'll go primarily first. Satan's number one goal is to shut the gospel up.

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He doesn't want people hearing the gospel and being brought to penitent faith in Christ. Satan is very active in churches.

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We'll start with there. But that doesn't mean that Satan also isn't active out in the world. Now, I'm convinced that because Jesus has said that Satan was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, that Satan hasn't changed.

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His goal was to destroy humanity back in the beginning. So this attack that we're reading about here, he wants

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God to be the agent of humanity's murder. That's what's going on in this text.

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That didn't happen the way he planned it. So I have no problem saying that Satan is still continuing with his plan.

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My question though is, where do we decipher between good and evil?

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Okay. We have a long way to go. The tree of good and evil.

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Which is it? The good and evil. Today, you know, if people are giving you a really sound good, and they do, they sound good to the fact that it's gotten to the point where a lot of this belonging here is too good to be true.

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And people don't realize that too good to be true usually is too good to be true.

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I'm going to give you a simple answer, but it's not simplistic. Because you're asking, how do we distinguish?

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May I make a suggestion? Time to pull out your small catechism.

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And here's the reason why. The small catechism is short enough that you can actually pray it every day.

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It really is. And it begins with the Ten Commandments. You cannot exhaust what is going on in the

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Ten Commandments. You just can't do it. And so here's the thing, is that you have to have a standard from which you're operating from.

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So many people today, they're doing whatever seems best to them in their own minds.

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That's lawlessness. Let's talk about the nature of the law. In my sermon,

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I talked about the fact that it primarily exists to convict us of our sins. There's three primary uses of the law.

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Three. The first use is used by the government to curb evil. The government has the sword to punish evil and basically keep anarchy from ruling because we know what would happen if there was no government.

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We know how humanity is. So the government exists to keep a curb on evil so that we can, for the most part, live in peace.

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Second use is the major use, which is to show you your sin, which we talked about in the sermon today.

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Now there's a third use, and the third use is only for Christians. And this is where you have to be careful with it.

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The third use for Christians is that it shows us what it looks like to live in freedom.

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Having been set free from slavery to sin, death, and the devil, now what does freedom look like?

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So many people, they confuse the gospel. They think the gospel is, well, Christ has forgiven me, therefore

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I can go and sin all I want. That's a confusion of categories. Instead, having been set free from sin, if we're born in slavery to sin, what does freedom look like?

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So now get back into your small catechism. You shall have no other gods, first commandment.

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What does this mean? Fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Freedom looks like, true

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Christian freedom looks like not trusting in money, not trusting in status, not trusting in the government for my daily needs, but trusting instead only in God in all trials and troubles and even in good times.

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Second commandment, not misusing God's name. This means you don't speak lies about God using

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His name. Every time a pastor on a stage or in a pulpit speaks things that are not true about God, they're breaking this commandment.

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This is the preacher's sin primarily. So many people think that this is somehow limited to somebody who types

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OMG into their smartphone. That's like the tip of the iceberg. Freedom looks like keeping the

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Sabbath day holy and fearing and loving God so that we don't despise preaching in His Word, but instead we want to hear it and gladly learn it.

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This is what freedom looks like. Honoring your father and mother, and if you want a good explanation about how to kind of fill this out, the fourth commandment is not just talking about fathers and mothers.

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It's all society is based upon the family unit. So even our government and even the jobs that we all have, we have people who are in authority over us and so we honor them.

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We honor them and we obey them and we respect them and we don't lash out against authority or act in lawlessness.

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You must be taught in school. Taught to who? Taught in school, just to be not bad.

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Well, the US government has made this... Yeah. Yeah. And then we have you will not murder.

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And this is not just somebody's physical body. Living in freedom is this.

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The fearing, loving God so that you don't only hurt or harm your neighbor but you also help your neighbor and support your neighbor in his physical needs.

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This is what freedom looks like. Not committing adultery. Fearing and loving God so that you lead a sexually pure and decent life.

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And what we say and what we do and husbands and wives love and honor each other.

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This is what freedom looks like. You want to know what slavery looks like? Slavery looks like that guy who is sneaking around his wife's back to try to figure out a way to be with his mistress.

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That's not freedom. That is absolute slavery. And same for her as well.

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And they know what they're doing is wrong. Otherwise they wouldn't be sneaking around now, would they? Right?

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Yeah, I remember one time a co -worker of mine was cheating on his wife and literally had the audacity to tell me

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God told me to go with her. But it made him feel better.

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Oh yeah, of course it made him feel better. You're not defending him today. He needed to justify it.

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Yeah, he needed to justify it. So who did he pin it on? God. Oh, God told me in my heart that she's my soulmate.

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He told you nothing of the sort. You're lying to yourself. And you're using

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God's name to justify your sin. That's not freedom.

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That's slavery. Not stealing. We should fear and love God so we don't take our neighbor's money or possessions.

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But it's more than that. Real freedom looks like this. We help our neighbors to improve and protect his possessions and his income.

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You see, because we've been set free in Christ and we are right standing before God is certain and sure because of what

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Christ has done, now we can actually do good works for our neighbors, for their sake, not ours.

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You think about the religion of works. The religion of works, you do your good works because you're trying to earn something from God.

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So if you're really helping your neighbor because you're trying to get in with God and maybe get an upgrade on your

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Olympic sized swimming pool in heaven, right? Are you really helping your neighbor for your neighbor's sake?

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No. Every single good work you're doing, you're actually doing it for yourself. Whereas if you're set free in Christ and you know that you're standing before God is 100 % done and secured by what

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Christ has done, you're now capable of doing good works for your neighbor's sake, not yours.

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Neverland makes you forget. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. And this is why I come back to my simple but not simplistic answer.

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I don't think any of us graduates from Luther's small catechism. None of us graduates from it.

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And if it's been years or decades since you've pulled that thing out, it's time to pull it out.

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Then I'll pray for you. Do we need to get copies of the catechism here?

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Okay. Okay. Here's the idea.

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This is the brilliance of the small catechism. It's short enough that you can pray it every day. Especially at least the three chief parts in the beginning.

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You begin with the Ten Commandments. And the idea is examine your life in light of the Ten Commandments. As Christians, we have nothing to fear from God's law because God's law has been silenced by what

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Christ has done. Now we can see it as what it looks like to live in freedom. So when you read the

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Ten Commandments and you sit there and go, whoops, preach the gospel to yourself, but Christ bled and died for me.

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And you'll get to that in the part regarding the creed anyway. So you've got the

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Ten Commandments, you've got the Apostles' Creed broken up into its different parts and then you also have the

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Lord's Prayer and its petitions. If you were to just go through the Ten Commandments, the

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Creed, and the Lord's Prayer on a daily basis or chop it up so that you're doing one part every day and then rotating, you'd be surprised.

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You'll get to the point where you can memorize it but at the same time, it's not simplistic.

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This thing is deep. It really has a way of kind of sticking in your mind and it preaches the gospel to you, it preaches the law to you and it shows you what freedom looks like and it teaches you to pray.

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It really does. So I'm a strong advocate for this idea we never graduate from the

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Catechism. So if you think, well my confirmation class was in 1950, yeah, time to pull this thing out.

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Time to pull it out. Now let's keep reading in Genesis. A serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the

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Lord God had made. He said to the woman, did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat from the trees in the garden but God did say you must not eat the fruit from the tree that's in the middle of the garden and you must not touch it or you will die.

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You will not surely die, the serpent said to the woman.

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And here is the attack. God isn't telling you the truth and watch this.

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There's something wrong with God's character. God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil and he doesn't want that.

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Look at the attack. Doubt his word and then attack God's character. You can always tell when somebody who poses as a

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Christian theologian isn't actually a true Christian theologian. They attack God's word and they attack his character.

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Serpentine, right? When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

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She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. And the eyes of both of them were open and they realized that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

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Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden of the cool of the day and they hid from the

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Lord God among the trees of the garden. Well that's going to be futile. But the Lord God called to the man, where are you?

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He answered, I heard you in the garden I was afraid because I was naked so I hid. And he said, who told you that you were naked?

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Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? And the man said, well the woman that you put here with me, she gave me some of the fruit from the tree and I ate it.

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Notice the attack, now it's your fault God, you gave me that woman. Then the

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Lord God said to the woman, what is this that you've done? The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate. So the

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Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above the livestock and all the wild animals.

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You will crawl on your belly, you will eat dust all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.

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He will crush your head and you will strike his heel. He there is referring to Jesus.

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The first promise of the Gospel here. To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing, with pain you will give birth to children, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.

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Kind of a two -fold part of this curse for the woman. Obviously the pain of childbirth and the need for epidurals happens here.

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Right? But then this kind of little more cryptic, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.

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This in a sense is talking about that constant tension that exists in marriages to this day.

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The battle over who's going to be in charge. And that's all part of the curse.

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That's all part of the curse. So that when married couples are doing this and they're jockeying to see who's really going to be in the driver's seat, that goes back to this as well.

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To Adam he said, because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat of it.

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Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

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Remember in chapter 2, God gave all the trees to have fruit for them.

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Now the curse is you have to work through painful toil in order to eat.

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Lovely. These were the days before combines. The ground will produce thorns and thistles for you.

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You will eat the plants of the field by the sweat of your brow. You will eat food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken.

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For dust you are and dust you will return. Adam named his wife

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Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. And here's kind of the merciful part.

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So we have a promise of the gospel, the one who would come to crush the head of the serpent, the seed of the woman.

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We'll flesh this out in just a second. And now there's a little hint of the gospel here. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

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How is that possible? God killed some animals. So here we have the first sacrifice.

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And it says, God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. This even hints at the gospel.

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Because as the gospel teaches us, we're clothed with the righteousness of Christ. So all the way back in the garden here, their nakedness is covered by God who sacrificed some animals in order for that to happen.

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Yes? So the tree had the good and the evil. So now...

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It was the knowledge of good and evil. Yeah, that's the serpent saying that.

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They're saying that because they ate of the tree and they found the knowledge, is that where they got the knowledge that they were naked?

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That they were embarrassed by it? Is that part of the knowledge? Well, at this point, they become aware of the fact...

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They become aware of good and evil and unfortunately... Well, in this particular case, it's the evil that they become supremely aware of by experience.

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They recognize that they're naked and they're hiding from God. Well, not the nakedness.

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But the fact that they're aware of it and they're ashamed and they're hiding. Notice how we react to God.

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God is holy. We know this. God is perfect. God is...

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Evil cannot exist in His sight. We all know this intuitively. So what happens is they know they've disobeyed

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God and they've got all this fear and they're hiding from Him. Rather...

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The naked thing is kind of the... Oh, and we're naked too. What they're ashamed of is their sin.

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Their eyes are opened at this point though and they truly do have the knowledge of good and evil. What the fruit can impart, it does give.

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But from because they've taken and disobeyed God, it's not a blessing.

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It's a curse. Yeah. Yes. Well, they know that they've done evil.

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It's corrupted, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They had no fear of God in that sense.

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They had nothing to fear from. You can almost think of them as like happy children, happy to see their father. Now the picture changes dramatically where they're hiding from God and they fear

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Him and they're afraid. They actually walked with God and they saw God and talked to God.

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Moses couldn't even see God. Right, exactly. He can't see God because inherently we are evil. Yeah.

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Our nature has been corrupted. So the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

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And the Lord God said, the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand to take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.

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So God in His mercy clothes them which is an allusion to sacrifice and also an allusion to the righteousness that comes from God.

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God clothes us in His righteousness. But then also God, notice here, He's very concerned about humanity.

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And then NIV doesn't pick this up as well as other translations. There's something going on here. There's kind of like an uncompleted thought where God doesn't actually finish

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His sentence. It's actually weird in the Hebrew. And He says that the man must not be allowed to reach out his hand to take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever.

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Like that can't happen. That would be terrible, right? Because what would happen if man were to live forever in this fallen state?

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Yeah, no kidding. It is a mercy of God that our lives are as short as they are.

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It really is. So let's kind of finish out the story and then we'll backtrack and take a look at some of the typological themes and might even tease some of this out from the book of Romans.

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So must not be allowed to reach out his hand, take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. So the Lord God banished him from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

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After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

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You can't get to eternal life that way. Now let's tease out some of these themes.

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Adam and Eve. Chapter 4 begins with the Satan. Adam lay with his wife Eve and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.

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So prior to the incident with the serpent you can think of Adam and Eve as betrothed but not married.

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The marriage had not been consummated. What does that make Eve? No, no, a virgin.

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Yeah. Prior, yeah, she's a virgin at the time of the encounter with the serpent.

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Yeah, okay. So Eve is a virgin. And notice in chapter 3 verse 15 the seed of the woman he will crush the head of the serpent.

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Notice it says seed of the woman. This is a direct prophecy regarding the virgin birth.

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Because is Jesus the seed of a man and a woman? No. Jesus doesn't have an earthly father does he?

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So it's this kind of teases this out and also it's kind of important then is that it shows us the virgin birth but typologically now we've got this interesting thing going on.

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Eve is a virgin. Mary is a virgin. And she begets the one who would save us.

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Let's tease out the idea regarding this tree of life. Can't go back to Eden and eat of the tree of life.

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What's the tree of life now? Okay, think more woody than that.

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The cross. The cross. So, if you start kind of teasing out these themes

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Adam is cursed what's the ground produced because of Adam? Thorns and thistles.

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What's the crown that Jesus is wearing on his head while he's being crucified? Thorns and thistles.

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Right? Yeah. None of this is by accident. You start putting the things together.

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Where was Jesus arrested? In a garden. Uh -huh.

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You start seeing these things and you go, man, is that an accident? The answer is no.

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It's not an accident. So, the theme of the virgin, the theme of thorns is showing up.

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The theme of sacrifice is there. And then the cross itself it's referred to as a tree.

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In Galatians it says, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. So, the cross is a tree. And it is the ultimate tree of death.

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Right? But Christ, by his death, turns it into, for us, the tree of life.

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So, the way to eternal life is now through the tree of life which is the cross. And what are the fruits of this tree of life that we eat?

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The Lord's body and blood. In communion. In the Lord's supper.

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That's the fruit of the tree. So, every time we have the

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Lord's supper you hear these words. Take, eat, this is the body of Christ broken for you for the forgiveness of your sins.

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Take, drink, this is the true blood of Christ shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins. This is the fruit of the tree of life.

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So, you see the themes there. You see the themes there. The thorns, the tree of life, the sacrifice, the virgin.

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It's all there. And when you start to tease these themes out and I pointed this out a couple weeks ago but it bears repeating that the church is called the bride of Christ.

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Church is called the bride of Christ. And for some of you men out there who think, man, my wife's difficult.

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You should talk to Jesus. Okay, his bride's crazy. But the reality of the situation is that Christ doesn't blame his bride for her sins.

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He dies for them. Whereas Adam blamed God for his sin and for being tempted by his wife and listening to her.

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Jesus doesn't do that. He silently takes her sins upon himself and goes to the cross and bleeds and dies for her.

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So, you got these wonderful things. I mean, you really can't plumb the depths of it. When you start looking for Jesus in the

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Old Testament, he's like everywhere. Stephen? I know that in all the stories you see

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Jesus, like Exodus, and all the stories of King David and everything else.

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But if you were to look at Jesus' life chronologically, when you look at it backwards, like from the beginning to the end, does it basically perfectly resemble

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Israel from Moses back into Genesis? The best way to put it is that the chronology is the least important part.

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It's the fulfillment of the types and shadows. So real quick, we'll just do a little

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Bible quiz. Who is it in the Old Testament who takes Israel into Egypt? It's not

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Moses. The one who takes Israel into Egypt is

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Joseph. Jesus' father is Joseph. And Joseph takes

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Jesus into Egypt. To fulfill the prophecy out of Egypt, I've called my son.

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Israel spends how many years in the wilderness being tempted? 40 years. Jesus spends how long in the wilderness?

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40 days. You start to see these things, and the idea is that when we start to see what's going on in Scripture, that it's about Jesus, the

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Old Testament paints in types and shadows what the reality is going to be.

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And Jesus himself is all of Israel reduced to one human being, one man.

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He's everybody. He's the perfect representative of Israel and of all of mankind.

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And so where Israel fails, Jesus succeeds. Does that make sense?

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And so when you start looking for Jesus in all these passages, then you start to understand who this text is about.

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Now moving forward from the garden then, the reason why the Bible is the way it is, and why we're following these stories about these people, is because of the scarlet thread.

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This is the way the Church Fathers talk about it. The scarlet thread is the royal bloodline of Jesus. So we go from Adam and Eve, to Abel, to his generations, to Noah, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, and on on to Moses.

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And what we're doing is we're following the scarlet thread and look for the Messiah along the way.

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And I'll point them out to you because if you keep that in mind, Jesus is there unborn in every one of these old patriarchs that is a direct descendant of his.

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So when David goes onto the battlefield with Goliath, who's really the one stepping onto the battlefield?

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Jesus is. It's Jesus who's the one who's stepping up onto the battlefield. Now if you think that that story's about you slaying the

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Goliaths in your life, you've kind of missed the whole point. Because it's really about the one who slayed the real

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Goliath that we all have for us. Now, real quick, let's spend a little bit of time in the book of Romans, because I want to do some cross -reference work so we can see what's going on.

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Let's go back to our epistle reading from Romans chapter 3 and we'll move forward, because I want to get some context.

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So we'll look at Romans chapter 3, starting at verse 19. Romans 3, 19.

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And we're going to read, we're going to finish 3, read 4, and then get into 5.

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And I'll do this real quick, kind of in a setting because what we're looking for here, as I'm reading this, pay attention when we get into 5 where it talks about Adam.

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But I want you to see the context of Paul's argument so we're not just proof -texting Adam. And then ask yourself this question.

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When we get to chapter 5 and Paul starts talking about Adam, if Adam never existed as a human being, then is what

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Paul's saying in chapter 5 make any sense? Okay? Just kind of keep that in the front of your head.

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Verse 19, chapter 3. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.

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Therefore, no one, not one, will be declared righteous in God's sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

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But now a righteousness from God apart from the law has been made known to which the law and the prophets testify.

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This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There's no difference.

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All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, are declared righteous freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

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God presented Him, Jesus, as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate

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His justice because in His forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate

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His justice at the present time so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

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So where then is boasting? It's excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No. But on that of faith.

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For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. So is

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God the God of the Jews only? No. Is He not the God of the

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Gentiles too? Yes. Of the Gentiles too. Since there is only one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.

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So then do we nullify the law by this faith? Oh no. Not at all. Rather we uphold the law. So what then shall we say that Abraham our forefather discovered in this matter?

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If in fact Abraham was justified by works well he had something to boast about but not before God.

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But what does the scripture say? It says in Genesis chapter 15 Abraham believed God and it was credited or counted to him as righteousness.

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So when a man works his wages are not credited to him as a gift but as an obligation.

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However to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked.

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Who does God justify? The wicked. Anyone here not that?

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I am. Right? God who justifies the wicked his faith is credited as righteousness.

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Now David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works.

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Here's what the psalmist David says. Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven. Whose sins are covered.

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Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.

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By the way that's all of us. Here. God's never going to count your sin against you.

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You're in Christ. You're washed. You're redeemed. You're forgiven. Right?

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So then is this blessedness only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised?

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We have been saying that Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness. Under what circumstances was it credited?

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Was it after he was circumcised or was it credited before? Well it was not after but before.

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And he received the sign of circumcision which is a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.

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So then he is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised in order that righteousness might be credited to them.

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And he is also the father of the circumcised who not only are circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father

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Abraham had before he was circumcised. It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be the heir of the world but through the righteousness that comes by faith.

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For if those who live by the law are heirs well faith has no value and the promise is worthless because law brings wrath.

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And where there is no law there is no transgression. Therefore the promise comes by faith so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all of Abraham's offspring.

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Not only to those who are of the law but also those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.

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As it is written I have made you a father of many nations he is our father in the sight of God in whom he believed the

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God who gives life to the dead and calls the things that are not as though they were. Against all hope

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Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations just as it had been said to him so shall your offspring be.

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Without weakening in his faith he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead since he was about 100 years old and that Sarah's womb was also dead.

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Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God being fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised.

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This is why it was credited to him as righteousness. The words it was credited to him were not written for him alone but also for us to whom

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God will credit righteousness. For us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead he was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.

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So when you look in the mirror of the law and the reflection comes back sinner, sinner, sinner, sinner, sinner.

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That's true. But you trust the promises of God. Promises of God say forgiven, redeemed, purchased.

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Right? We continue. Now here's the part regarding Adam. Therefore since we have been justified through faith does that sound like it's finished?

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It doesn't say therefore since we are kind of sort of being justified and maybe we'll make it.

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No, no, no. You have been justified through faith. We now have peace with God through our

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Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

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And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so but also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance.

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Perseverance character, character hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love in our hearts by the

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Holy Spirit whom he has given us. You see at the right time when we were still powerless

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Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man.

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Though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this.

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While we were still sinners Christ died for our sins. Since we have now been justified by his blood how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him.

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What are we saved from according to that text? God's wrath. So the one who says oh

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God would never send anybody to hell and God's not wrathful and stuff like that right? You say oh I'm sorry but God's word says otherwise.

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I'm going to go with what God's word says and not listen to you. Right? So while we were still sinners

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Christ died for us and we're being saved from God's wrath. For if when we were God's enemies we were reconciled to him through the death of his son how much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through his life.

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Not only is this so but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have now received reconciliation.

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Therefore, here's the important part. Ask yourself this question if Adam never lived does this statement make any sense?

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Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin and in this way death came to all men because all sinned.

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Does that make sense if Adam didn't really live? It doesn't does it? Paul's talking here as if Adam was a legit human being and that sin came into the world through him.

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Right? Therefore just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin and in this way death came to all men because all sinned.

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For before the law was given sin was in the world but sin is not taken into account where there is no law.

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Nevertheless death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses even over those who did not sin by breaking a command as did

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Adam who was a pattern of the one to come. You can even say a type of the one to come, a tupos.

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So Adam is type and shadow of the one to come, Jesus. And it says that death reigned over the time of Adam to the time of Moses.

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You'll notice when we read other parts of scripture, scripture interprets scripture. Scripture never ever talks about the creation of man or the creation of the universe as if it was mythological.

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Always talks about it as if it's historical. And so if Jesus' work is hinged on correcting the problem that was created by Adam and Eve without Adam the gospel makes no sense.

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If you want to believe evolution and deny that Adam and Eve were literal historical people, what you're doing is you're cutting yourself off ultimately from the real gospel.

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You're going to have to fabricate a different one altogether because the real gospel only makes sense if the real problem we all face is that we're all born dead in trespasses and sins and under a curse because of the one man's sin.

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The two go together. The gift is not like the trespass, verse 15, for if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did

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God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many?

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Again, the gift of God is not like the result of one man's sin. The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.

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For if by the trespass of the one man death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive

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God's abundant provision of grace and the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man,

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Jesus Christ? Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men.

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For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

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You see? This passage takes Christ's work and Adam's work and weaves them together in such a way you can't separate them.

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Jesus is the antidote for the problem created by Adam. If you get rid of Adam, you've gotten rid of the work of the cross and there's no way around it.

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So the law was added so that the trespass might increase but where sin increased, grace increased all the more.

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So that just as sin in just as sin reigned in death, so that also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our

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Lord. Fascinating when you start taking a look at how scripture interprets scripture and all of these questions that are thrown at us by skeptics and even skeptics within the visible church.

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And I say that because when we confess one holy catholic and apostolic church we believe that the church exists but that's an article of faith because we can't see the church.

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Technically we can't. So we know that the church is there, the church is here today, but I can't see into your heart, you can't see into my heart so we confess it and we believe it by faith.

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But when in the visible church you have somebody who thinks that they know better than Jesus, thinks that they know better than Paul, thinks that they know better than God the

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Holy Spirit and say it's just ridiculous for somebody in the 21st century who's capable of getting on the internet using 4G

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LTE on a smartphone to actually believe that some guy named Adam and his wife

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Eve were having a conversation with a talking snake. Come on, this is the 21st century and my answer is well iPhones have nothing to do with it.

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Right? Doesn't matter how technologically advanced we are, the reality of the situation is that God's word says and I trust

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God's word because I trust Jesus and God's word says Adam was a legit human being.

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That the reason why we lose people to death to terrible health problems and relationships go south and there's a wake of destruction even in your own life, if you're honest and you look behind you, right?

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The reason for all of this is because of sin and that sin entered the world because Adam and Eve disobeyed

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God and that's what this text just read and the solution is Jesus. Jesus came to solve the problem created by Adam and without Adam, you don't really have can make sense of anything that Jesus did but when you know that he existed, he truly sinned and we're all sinners because of the one man's sin, then we also understand that through the one man's righteousness

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Christ who is the second Adam we are made righteous that's the solution the two go hand in hand, you pull them apart you lose the gospel.

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You deny Adam exists, you lose the gospel. That's what's at stake and so just be good, simple, child like Christians and believe what