Transcription downloaded from https://sermons.pcbc.nz/sermons/56248/look-what-sin-has-done-genesis-31-24/.

Disclaimer: this is an automatically generated machine transcription - there may be small errors or mistranscriptions.
Please refer to the original audio if you are in any doubt.


[0:00] Good. So if you could turn to Genesis 3 in your Bibles phones. I'll just read the passage that Pastor William will be sharing from.

[0:16] And yeah, so just follow with your eyes or you can picture the story going on. It's pretty exciting. So now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God has made.

[0:29] He said to the woman, Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it or you will die.

[0:49] You will not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman, for God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. God, knowing good and evil.

[1:01] When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it.

[1:17] Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

[1:32] And they heard from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, Where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.

[1:46] And he said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? The man said, The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.

[2:01] Then the Lord God said to the woman, What is this you have done? The woman said, The serpent deceived me and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals.

[2:18] You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers.

[2:30] He will crush your head and you will strike his heel. To the woman he said, I will make your pains and childbearing very severe. With painful labor you will give birth to children.

[2:43] Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. To Adam he said, Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat from it.

[2:57] Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you. And you will eat the plants of the field.

[3:09] By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. Since from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.

[3:21] Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.

[3:37] He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and 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.

[3:49] After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the garden of Eden, shuribim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

[4:01] And that is the word of God. Thank you. How's that?

[4:13] Yep. Great. Yep. I'm one of the pastors here. Really a privilege to open up this. You said exciting, Venus. It's pretty dramatic, isn't it? So let's see what God has to say to us from this part of his holy inspired word.

[4:30] And I just want to remind you guys, thank you for coming. I know it's hard. I know there are a lot of distractions. There are a lot of challenges, anxieties in your life right now. And I just thought, I saw this earlier this week, and just for a bit of perspective.

[4:45] This is some of our brothers and sisters gathering in Kiev in Ukraine on the Lord's Day. Right? They had to walk three blocks past air raid sirens to get to church.

[4:56] And that's Pastor Vitali in Chasson. We heard their choir sing so beautifully. Now their city is overrun by invading forces.

[5:08] Wherever you are today, whether you're live stream, whether you're here, let's remind each other the safest place to be on the Lord's Day is where God's word is preached, where Christ is honored, where the spirit is at work among us.

[5:21] Let's pray. Amen. Father, we look at this chapter of Genesis, and we are shocked. We are amazed.

[5:34] We are saddened. Look what sin has done. But thank you that because of your Son, Jesus Christ, we can read this passage and know that you have covered our shame.

[5:48] You have crushed the serpent's head. Let us see this together. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Just before we came into church, I said hi to most of you.

[6:00] Myself and one of our kids, we were just, you know, greeting people. I was just noticing some really nice cars. I was just noticing some nice cars out there. So, you know, Honda Civic, Jazz, Ford Ranger.

[6:14] Mm, wow. I had my nice car moment. The first three weeks we, in the third week that we moved back from overseas to come back to Auckland, I got to buy a nice car.

[6:29] And it was our Toyota Vanguard. Mm, nice family car. Seven-seater. Looked shiny at the time. Yeah, could fit all our family on a RAV4 base.

[6:43] So, I don't know, it moved pretty nicely. And I just remember getting the keys to this thing. I'd never had a keyless, you know, touch-button ignition car in my life before. Wow.

[6:55] So amazing. So new. So nice. And then a few months later, I was just hanging out at a cafe and then just trying to reverse and park the car.

[7:07] I think I was a little bit distracted. And I thought, okay, I need to get my coffee from McDonald's now. And before I know it, smashed. And I walk out and, oh my goodness, that is my rear bumper.

[7:22] Look what the pole has done. Hmm. Perhaps you've experienced a similar irreversible moment. Maybe it's the moment that your brand new phone dropped and the screen smashed.

[7:37] Maybe it's the day the test results returned. Maybe it's the night that you broke up. Paradise lost. Or maybe, as we've already talked about, you see this in the world around us, right?

[7:52] But war and division. Church conflict. Friendships. Being betrayed. Cliques forming. Enemies forming.

[8:05] And the question we can often ask is this. If God made the world so good, as we've already heard in the past two chapters, why is this world so messed up? What is wrong with our world today?

[8:17] Why is there so much hurt and pain? If God is there. Well, Genesis 3 captures for us the moment in history the screen smashed for humanity.

[8:31] What was once good in the garden, God's place, God's people under God's rule. Broken. Innocence lost. Sin begins. And look, this is a pretty bleak chapter.

[8:43] And so we will need to remind ourselves, this is not how the story finishes. There is grace and mercy awaiting us in Jesus Christ. The Saturday and Sunday service, some of you have already heard this, actually they split this chapter into two parts.

[9:01] So we're going to do it in one. I hope you'll see why. But if you do have questions about some of the details, the final details, please use them. Maybe use the board and post up a question. Or you can come and ask me.

[9:12] Or group leaders would love to help you to understand this passage better. But yeah, we're just going to sweep through the whole of Genesis 3 today. And I've divided today's chapter into four sections.

[9:22] And on the screen is the first section, I think, of our passage. So let's look first at the temptation that we know. The temptation that we know. And it says at the start of this chapter, Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.

[9:41] There's no chapter numbers in the first original Bible. So this kind of actually follows straight on from the verse before. The man and his wife were both naked and they felt no shame. In fact, in the Hebrew, naked and crafty actually rhyme.

[9:54] So it's almost like saying they were unashamed and nude, yet the serpent was shrewd. It's kind of flowing straight into this chapter. And look, we're Kiwis.

[10:05] We've lived here most of our life. Most of us have no idea what to do with snakes. We've never seen one, right? But for the first readers of Genesis, the moment they mention snake, okay, it symbolized for them immediate danger.

[10:22] Mortal threat. Perhaps it would have symbolized for some of those early readers some of Israel's other threats. Think of Pharaoh of Egypt, for example, whose crown has a snake, a cobra, at the front of it, for example.

[10:36] I think today's equivalent would be, if we had to retell, you know, the story of evil coming into the garden, maybe it would be like this. Now, the man with the white face and no nose crept into the garden.

[10:49] You see, immediately you know who it is. Evil personified. Here is a sneaky, subtle kind of evil about to sow chaos into God's created order.

[11:01] And what does the snake say? It says this to the woman. Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?

[11:11] It's ironic, isn't it? Straight after God creates the world with words, the enemy starts to break the world with words. And look, initially, the woman seems to respond well, right?

[11:26] She calls out the serpent. What he says is, as fake news, look at verse 2. 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 fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden.

[11:38] And you must not touch it or you will die. Is that it? Has a snake lost? Is it humans one? Satan zero? GG? Look again. Look again, okay?

[11:49] We don't gloss over this carefully. We don't gloss over this lightly. We need to look carefully. I think what we need to do is compare what Eve describes of God's instructions to what God actually said in chapter 2, verses 17 and 16.

[12:07] In chapter 2, God said this, you may freely eat from any tree in the garden. But when Eve reports it back, she says, we may eat fruit from the trees of the garden.

[12:19] Do you see the difference? And then when God says, you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat of it, you will surely die. Can you see the difference in what the woman says?

[12:33] This is how she quotes God. You must not eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden. And you must not touch it or you will surely die. Can you see the subtle changes, the things that she hasn't got quite right?

[12:49] What led to Eve's temptation? A failure to know God's word, right? Why does she add, and you must not touch it? Did God say that?

[13:02] Why did she add that? There's something going on in her imagination, what she's thinking about God, that has pushed her to say something like this.

[13:14] It seems her view of God has already been distorted well before the next few verses. You will not surely die, verse 4, the serpent said to the woman.

[13:26] For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. I think it's ironic, the woman doesn't quite get God's word right, his instructions.

[13:40] But the serpent here seems to quote God's word fairly accurately. And everything he says about God sounds mostly true, and yet by saying, not you will surely die, the serpent now is directly contradicting God's word.

[13:58] And not only that, he's twisting God's character. He's planted the seed of tempting the woman to think of God as stingy, right?

[14:09] She thinks, you must not touch that. As demanding, as unfair. I think we need to remember this, our biggest temptations to sin, they rarely show up in very obvious ways.

[14:24] All right? Easy for you to fend off someone coming up to you and says, you should worship Allah. Or, hey, can you be a Buddhist today? That strategy doesn't quite hit hard.

[14:37] But the strategy that is far more effective is to say what seems true, but is not, isn't it? The serpent lays the trap, sets the poison up, and the temptation is offered, right?

[14:56] Will she doubt God's goodness? Will she distort God's word? What happens next? Let's look from verse 6 to 13.

[15:07] This is where we talk about the rebellion that we share. When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

[15:22] She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. Instead of listening to God's voice, right? What did God say? You can eat from every tree, just not this one.

[15:35] What happens here is that she's become so fixed on the one negative command. Don't eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

[15:47] In her mind, God has gone from someone who generously says yes to narrow down to the one no. And so, she eats.

[16:00] In the movie The Greatest Showman, some of you have probably sung this by heart, or watched it at least, the climax of the first act comes, sorry, that picture's a little bit dark, when a bearded lady, right, and her fellow circus misfits, they decide not to stay hidden anymore at the party.

[16:21] They decide to march out and to sing words like this. I'm marching to the beat of my drum. I'm not scared to be seen. I make no apologies.

[16:34] This is me. The first woman probably didn't have a beard. But in eating the fruit, she is also declaring, this is me.

[16:49] But unlike the body positive image of, like, The Greatest Showman, right? There's some good about that. When the first woman declares, this is me, she's essentially declaring independence from the God who created her, who provides for her, who is generous to her.

[17:08] This is a declaration of independence. And I put verse 4 up because I want you to notice, actually, it is not just the woman at fault. This is a shared declaration of independence.

[17:21] Not only does verse 6 say her husband, who was with her, ate the fruit too, actually, in the original language, the serpent has been talking to both the woman and the man. Okay? Verse 4, it's actually you plural, y'all.

[17:34] Okay? You guys will not certainly die. Each time the serpent's been talking, it's been to both of them. Equally rebellious. Man and woman.

[17:44] And even though it looks different, the action looks different, the woman eats first, but look, the man in his silence, right, did not do the right thing either. Have you ever had that experience?

[17:56] Someone is gossiping in your group, and then someone else stays silent. Both are at fault. Can you see that? It's what we have here. At the heart of the first sin, though, ultimately, is two people declaring, this is me.

[18:15] Sharing their desire to live apart from God's good word for them. And because of this, we would be so foolish, so wrong, to pretend we have not ever done this ourselves.

[18:32] Could you say that you have never had this rebellious heart too, this declaration of independence in your heart? Perhaps I could ask you to think about it.

[18:45] How many choices did you make this past week by saying, this is me, rather than, this is God's will for me? Be honest.

[18:57] Scroll through all those decisions we made in the past week. Just like we cannot escape resembling our parents, we cannot escape from the fact that each of us, to some extent, has shared this rebellious gene from our first parents.

[19:20] And I want to emphasize that sin is not just the behavior, right? It's not just the sin that Eve and Adam committed was not just what they did or didn't do with the fruit.

[19:34] It started well earlier. It started well earlier, didn't it? In the heart. Sin is actually God's creatures curving themselves away from their creator in their hearts.

[19:46] It is having a distorted view of his gracious character, refusing then to live under his good word. Sin is not just a behavior problem, friends.

[19:56] It is a heart problem. Let me quote an author. He tries to explain this connection. Let me quote from him. He says this, what the serpent accomplished in Eve's mind, right?

[20:07] His affections, her will, was to just separate, to divorce between God's revealed will, right? His instructions, and his gracious, generous character.

[20:20] Trust in him was transformed into suspicion of him by looking at the law and the naked law by itself rather than hearing law from the gracious lips of a heavenly father.

[20:31] You see, God became to Eve he whose favor has to be earned. And the lie we now believe, even today, is that to glorify God, we can't enjoy him forever.

[20:43] We have to lose our joy. Can you see, friends, the reason Eve felt free to disobey God's word in verse 6 is because in verse 2 she already started to have a distorted view of God's heart.

[21:02] I hope you can see that. This is vital. Because this means that you may have attended church all your life. You may consider yourself a good moral person.

[21:14] You may have never touched anything that's been sexually immoral. You may have never disobeyed your parents even once. But if sin is a heart issue, then none of us are innocent.

[21:27] All of us have fallen short of God's glory. All of us have had wrong thoughts about God. All of us have thought of him not as good and gracious as he really is.

[21:41] And sometimes it makes us deliberately pick the wrong fruit and make a bad decision. But sometimes, maybe you've been making good decisions all your life, but you're still resentful and bitter at your gracious God.

[21:59] We all share in sin. It's the virus that has infected us all. Let me give you an example. Let's say I want to show that sin actually starts not just from the disobedience, but our warped view of God.

[22:14] That's what I'm trying to show you. That's what we see in this passage. Let's say I'm a teenager and I lied to my parents. I'm studying, I'm studying, mum.

[22:25] I'm not. I'm just gaming. Look, the lie is sin. But so is the selfish thought much earlier that God, you should just let me do what I want on my computer.

[22:38] You see? Your wrong thought of God here led you to the wrong action there. Sin starts within. Let's say I'm a dad, I'm a dad, I lose my temper and I shout at my wife or one of my kids.

[22:54] That burst of uncontrolled rage is sin, isn't it? But so is that selfish thought that I was harboring all day. God, I work so hard today.

[23:05] I'm so tired. I just, I deserve some peace and quiet. I don't need kids running around. I don't need being reminded of things I haven't done in the house. Can you see?

[23:18] Behind every this is me moment in our hearts is the uncomfortable truth. We have lost sight. We have misunderstood how good, how gracious our God is.

[23:30] just like our first parents. We see only his rules without his love and generosity. Just like our first parents, we have literally missed the forest of yes from God and we've zeroed in on that tree that says no to us and then we hate God and then we decide we run our lives better, God, and then we fall into rebellion.

[23:54] We share this. What is sin? Sin is rejecting or ignoring God and the world he created. Sin is rebelling against him by not living under his word.

[24:05] Sin is saying to God, this is me. I want to run my life. The story moves very dramatically after this. If you look at verse 7 to 8, from that first bite, the damage is done, the mirror is shattered, right?

[24:20] We start to see a relationship unraveling. The man and the woman, they experience two new thoughts, as you can see, right? They realize, right, shame, they're naked.

[24:33] Then they realize fear. They hide from God. And when God approaches them personally, tries to find them, they run away. And now, the relationship between God and his people have changed immediately.

[24:49] Two things have changed immediately. Notice in verse 9 to 10, right? One, that vertical relationship with God, so intimate in chapter 2, it's shattered. What does a man say to God?

[25:02] Verse 10, I heard you and I feared you because I was naked and I hid. Whatever feelings he had before now replaced with suspicion and fear.

[25:13] Secondly, not just vertically, a shattered relationship, but horizontally. I mean, look at verses 11 and 12. Because when God asked the obvious question, who told you you were naked?

[25:25] Did you eat from the tree that I asked you not to? The man goes and blames his wife. Right? Only a few verses earlier, we had a beautiful wedding song for his strong partner.

[25:40] Now he throws her under a bus. And in verse 13, the woman fares no better. She doesn't deny she took the fruit, right? But she blames the serpent, right?

[25:51] Always blaming someone else but deceiving her rather than admitting that actually she's been having hard thoughts about God. Before God, our first parents have become fearful, ashamed, guilty, rebellious.

[26:09] But amidst all this, please don't forget what it does say in the text as well. Verse 12 says, excuse, excuse, excuse, but yes, I ate it.

[26:21] Verse 13 does say, yes, here's an excuse, but God, yes, I ate it. Friends, we share in humanity's first rebellion, but this passage also invites us to share in humanity's first confession as well.

[26:40] Yes, Lord God, I ate it. Yes, Lord God, I watched it. Yes, Lord God, I did it.

[26:52] After all, how could you hide anything before our maker? From verse 14, now the story shifts, right?

[27:07] It seems to shift so quickly. We go from the paradise of the garden before to a world that actually sounds actually very familiar. I wonder if, as Venus read those things that God said about the world, what would happen to people, you thought, oh, this sounds very familiar now.

[27:23] These verses from verse 14 to 24, I think they describe the world we now live in, don't they? We see God the gardener become God the judge. We see now a range of consequences.

[27:35] And so we're going to skim through these, but I want to just focus and show you some of the changes, some of the consequences of humanity's first sin, right? Two things occur, two things become painful, and one warning comes true.

[27:49] Firstly, two things occur because of sin. Verse 14 tells us, firstly, the serpent is cursed, condemned to crawl on the dust for deceiving the woman.

[28:00] From this day on, the snake and her offspring are mortal enemies. And secondly, verse 17 tells us that the ground is cursed too. You see the word cursed is the ground because of you.

[28:13] God says to the man, where gardening used to probably be really easy and fruitful and abundant, now weeds grow. Now what was as simple as just picking fruit from the trees takes hard, hard work.

[28:30] Remember, friends, the two things that are cursed are not the man and the woman because they are still, we are still God's image bearers. God is so kind, isn't he?

[28:41] Far kinder than we deserve. And yet, there have been consequences because of sin, because of our desire to live apart from God. Our ground is cursed. The second aspect, two things become more painful because of sin.

[28:58] Firstly, our work becomes more painful. Ian mentioned this and I mentioned this as well. Look, actually in the first two chapters, we get presented work as a good and beautiful thing.

[29:09] It's a kind of image our hardworking God who created the world, who sustains it. To be fruitful and multiply is to join in in what God has been doing. Right?

[29:20] To work the ground is to participate in God's good creation, to bring God's blessing. And yet, in verse 16, now we see pain.

[29:33] Pain in our work. And there's two kinds of work, right, that we talk about. So, for the woman, you know, one of the most important parts of vocations or callings in their life is to bear children.

[29:45] And in verse 16, we see that God says, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing. And with pain you shall bear sons. Do you see that?

[29:58] Work used to be easy and fruitful and blessing. Now we still work and bring blessing, but it will come through pain. For the woman, her work of being a mother brings pain and heartbreak from conception to delivery, from the cradle to the grave.

[30:12] There is pain involved. And yet, God brings pain to the husband too, right? From 17 to 19. It says, he curses the ground, yes, but 17, it says, look, your work of getting food is going to become painful too.

[30:29] It's going to bring sweat. It's going to be painful toil. It's going to mean working the ground and being frustrated by the hard work it is until our bodies return to the ground. Look, work is still a blessing.

[30:43] We learned this already, but it no longer satisfies us fully. It's now frustrating. No longer brings the same benefits for the effort we put in. Life has become harder, hasn't it?

[30:57] So our work becomes painful. The other thing that becomes painful, I think, is our relationships. Zerion, in that verse 16, on that second half, it says, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.

[31:14] The Hebrew in here is notoriously tricky to translate. There are a lot of debates around this. I think what's going on here is that the Lord is just simply saying this. In Genesis 2, there was harmony and unity between man and woman, wasn't there?

[31:30] But because of sin, there is now no longer that kind of unitedness. Because of sin, women will turn to men for affection, but find rejection, find frustration.

[31:42] Because of sin, men will mistreat their wives, they will dominate them, they will rule them harshly instead of leading them gently. How tragic.

[31:55] And look, these distortions that we see in the first marriage, they ripple out, right? All men start to be abusive. All women start to feel that neediness that can't be always solved.

[32:12] And we experience that in different ways in different relationships. Look what sin has done. cursed the ground, brought pain to our lives. And finally, because of sin, one warning comes true.

[32:29] Death. Do you remember how the Lord warned the man or the woman? On the day that you eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, you will surely die. And while Adam and Eve, they don't die straight away, we see in verse 19, actually now, the gears are set in motion.

[32:45] Because humanity is made from dust, now they will return to dust. The serpent lied.

[32:57] They will surely die. The apostle Paul, reflecting on this truth, he puts it this way in Romans chapter 5. He says, therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, in this way, death came to all people because all sinned.

[33:20] By the Lord's grace, not all of us will get Omicron or whatever variant that comes through. And yet, all of us have been infected with the curse of sin that we call death.

[33:31] 10 out of 10 of us will one day die. Because as one author put it, while we are victims of chaos and evil introduced to our world, we have also been perpetrators.

[33:45] We have caused chaos and evil. Yes, you and I are victims of horrible things, discrimination, exploitation, hurt, and shame, and betrayal.

[33:57] And yet, we have contributed to the sin and chaos too. We have broadcast gossip and slander. We have scrolled our minds to death on things that are worthless.

[34:09] We have degraded our bodies. We have argued. We have gotten bitter. And all of this leads to our death in more ways than one.

[34:22] PCBC, why is there so much hurt, pain, and sorrow in our world? Because we share in Adam's likeness. This is what sin has done to us.

[34:34] Corrupted our human nature. Brought judgment that we share in, we contribute to, that we deserve. I know this is a hard and weighty chapter.

[34:49] Dramatic yes. Heartbreaking yes too. And you might be wondering, where is the hope where is God's grace in all this mess?

[35:03] Earlier this week I watched a trailer for a new Star Wars series coming out this week. I don't know when it's coming out but it looked pretty good. I feel like it will be very redemptive after Jar Jar thinks.

[35:14] Full of hype and hope. And I want to suggest to you, even here in Genesis 3, sounds so bleak, right? we get two trailers to the rest of God's story.

[35:26] We get two snapshots of a God who does not wipe out sinners, of a God who shows mercy that we don't deserve. And so I want to share that with you briefly before we finish.

[35:37] One snapshot right at the end of this chapter is this. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

[35:53] Yes, God has to banish Adam and Eve from paradise. A holy God cannot be present among humans infected, tainted by sin.

[36:04] They cannot take the fruit, the other fruit and be God so they must leave and the curtain closes on the garden of Eden. But how does God deal with their newfound shame and nakedness?

[36:19] He clothes them. An animal died to clothe them, to cover their shame through sacrifice, right? Their sin, their shame was dealt with.

[36:32] What a snapshot. What a taster of God's mercy. And look, the other snapshot comes from the verse that we've been reciting all month. I will put enmity between you and the woman, God said to the snake, and between your offspring and hers.

[36:47] He will crush your head and you will strike his heel. You know, every epic story, right, Lord of the Rings, World War II movies, is a battle between good and evil.

[36:59] And the Bible is no different. Because here, we get the start of a conflict between the serpent and the seed that runs through the whole of Bible history.

[37:10] It ends actually in the final chapters in Revelation, where we hear about a battle between the dragon and the woman, representing Satan and the church. And right in the middle of salvation history, we get the good news of Jesus Christ, don't we?

[37:27] Our God who is merciful, our God who crushes the serpent's head. How does he do this? How does he do this? He comes to earth, he walks on the dust of this cursed ground.

[37:42] Jesus comes and he's born of a woman. He is willing to be tempted by Satan and yet defeat him in the wilderness with God's word rightly applied.

[37:54] He comes up victorious, he never doubts God's good word, he is completely innocent and yet we know that our Lord Jesus was betrayed by sinners, was he not? And on the cross, Jesus is healed and his arms, they are crushed with the nails of a cross.

[38:15] He is naked and shamed there. He is crucified as a sinner. And all the powers of evil, Satan included, they think they've won, God's son is crushed, but three days later, he rises again.

[38:33] He defeats death. By his resurrection, he proves that he has the power to crush sin and death. Praise God. He proves his authority to cancel our debts, to forgive our sins, to cover our shame.

[38:48] Because of the cross, every son of Adam, every daughter of Eve who turns to Christ will find grace and mercy for their sins.

[38:59] This is the good news. This is the good news for you. One author puts it this way, for as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.

[39:13] Only because we are broken can this good news be so good. And so I want to encourage you, put your faith in Christ again, the seed of the woman.

[39:26] Put your trust in the son of Adam again, the senator of Eve. When you do that, you will certainly not die. In Christ, you and I can be who God truly made us to be, unashamed, restored, to know God and enjoy him forever.

[39:45] Yes, this is what sin has done. It has tempted us to sin. It has stirred us to rebel against our maker. Yet this is what God has done.

[39:58] He covers our shame, promises a seed, and He crushes the serpent's head at the cross. Friends, our sins may be many, but in Christ, His mercy is more.

[40:13] Let's pray. Lord, if you should count our sins, the things we've done, also the things we've not done to please you, the thoughts we've had and the thoughts we haven't had, who, O Lord, could stand?

[40:35] And yet, because of Jesus Christ, Lord, our sins are many, but in Him, your mercy is so much more.

[40:49] So we thank you, Father, and we ask that you would continue to remind us of the good news of Jesus, the horror of sin, and give us the strength of your Spirit to live out as followers of the true risen King who has crushed the serpent's head once and for all at the cross.

[41:11]  Father, I pray all these things in Jesus Christ's precious name. Amen.