A Long Fall Part 2B
When things go wrong, most people spend enormous time and energy trying to fix the symptoms of the problem. We manage behavior. We start over. We search for answers. But no matter how hard we try the problem doesn’t go away. Pastor Nick Gatzke explains why this struggle is not a symptom, but the diagnosis
Contrary to healthy leadership, harsh male dominion is the ongoing reminder of this fallen state of humanity. Sin taints our work, sin taints childbearing, sin taints our marriages. And the devastation of it knows no bounds. Look with me at verse 14. Here we see the third devastating effect of sin. And this is found in how God addresses the serpent himself. The first part of this curse is directed to the one who brought evil into the world, Satan, the devil. And verse 15 begins to hone in on this important reality of this. It will last through all time.
God says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring.” Who is the offspring of the woman? Verse 20 would go on to tell us that Eve is the mother of all the living. The enmity that occurs here is going to happen for all of humankind. And who is the offspring of the serpent? Jesus goes on to tell us in John 8:44 as he’s engaging with some of the Pharisees that are trying to thwart his work. He tells very directly, “You Pharisees, you who are trying to stop the things of God, you are of your father the devil. And your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth because there’s no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character. For he’s a liar and he’s the father of lies.”
There’ll be perpetual struggle between Satan and humankind. There’ll be perpetual struggle between the followers of Satan, which is really anyone who rejects the work and ways of God and the followers of God. And this will happen throughout all of history. Verse 15 continues to say that he will bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. And this points to this ongoing struggle that we’ll have in life. Anyone who’s tried to pursue the ways of God has encountered this struggle. It’s a battle with your flesh, isn’t it? You know what it’s like. You know what it’s like to have, figuratively speaking, the temptation of Satan continually striking your heel.
Whether that is that desire to over indulge in food or drink, the desire to gossip, the desire to lift yourself up and knock others down, the sexual desires that so often are difficult to control, the list goes on and on and on. It’s back and forth. It’s a wrestling match in your flesh. It’s a striking between a snake and the offspring of a woman that show a lifelong battle in sin. This is a struggle that we know all too well. It’s a struggle that if you stop seriously and try to consider where your life fits in this world and how you might pursue God more faithfully, you will encounter along every turn. And sometimes you make decisions for faithfulness to God.
And seemingly, that’s it, you pursue faithfulness. But often you will make a decision for faithfulness to God and you will be encountered with difficulty, with attack, and with temptation. All along, we know this to be true in our own lives and we see it in those around us. But here we see in verse 15 that there’s even hope. There’s a description, a little glimpse of what is to come and we’ll come back to that in just a minute. Let’s take a step back for a minute and consider the implications for this pollution of sin in our lives. It seems to have no end.
One scholar says that they sinned by eating, and so they would suffer to eat. She led her husband to sin, so she would be mastered by him. They brought pain into the world by their disobedience, and so they would have painful toil in their respective lives. And the serpent ruined the human race, and so he would be destroyed. As long as sinful life exists, all of this evil consequence will continue. And it gets worse, because the consequences of sin are not just concentrated in the human nature and our propensity to keep sinning. When we were banished from the garden, the greatest consequence of sin was found in a loss of access and presence to the person of God himself. They would no longer enjoy his unique and immediate blessing.
From now on, he would be distant. They had everything they needed and so much more. They were in complete harmony with each other, complete harmony with the creation. Their work was fruitful and enjoyable, and they had complete harmony with the person of God. He was near to them. And if you think for a second that banishment from the garden, paradise lost was the greatest aspect of this punishment, consider that the greatest aspect of loss wasn’t the place, it was the person. The greatest loss was God. John Walton explains that the most vile aspect of human sin is not what it did to each of us, but what it did to God.
Our sin is a desecration of God. This desecration does not alter who God is, but it dishonors him. It can be compared to the disrespect done to a country when a flag is trampled on, torn, smeared with excrement, or burned. The country doesn’t suffer in the process, but a patriot will jump to its defense nonetheless. And in a similar vein, the most lamentable result of sin is not that it makes people bad, but it that makes God distant. The story we see through the whole Old Testament is a story not in which people are trying to regain paradise of the Garden of Eden. The story that we see through the Old Testament is that people are trying to regain a nearness and access to the person of God who they have driven away because of their sin. The sin that happened in the garden is indeed the sin that’s passed down to me and it’s passed down to you. And the consequences are passed down to me and to you. And the offense and the desecration is something that we also commit. And as a result, there’s distance. And I want us to understand something very clearly here because this is important to know. Our biggest problem in this life is not the sins that we commit. It’s not the actions of sin per se. Those are an outworking of the bigger problem and that is the sin that is in my life.
Our biggest problem is that we are polluted with sin. Sins are the individual actions, the outworking of this disease that we have, this curse that we’re under, this nature that’s been given to us. Now most people go through life and they think that as long as their good deeds outweigh their sinful deeds, then they stand on sound or healthy moral ground. This is because they focus on sins, not the pollution of sin. But let me explain it to you this way.
Imagine with me that all the choices in your life consists of a gallon of water that is right in front of me. And all the choices in my life consists of another gallon of water that is right in front of me. And the sins that we commit are represented by a cyanide pill that is dropped into that gallon of water every time we commit one. Now, you are an exceptional person, and so maybe you only commit six or seven sins your whole life. I’m a morally bankrupt person, and so I’m popping pills in that gallon of water like it’s tic-tacs to my three-year-old.
Now, when we come to the end of our days, what is the result going to be? Now, surely my gallon of water will have a higher concentration of the poison than your gallon of water. But at the end of our days, we both have poisonous gallons of water. And this is where Jesus comes in. Imagine a person comes along that says, don’t drink that poisonous water. You’re standing on the edge of eternity. And if you drink that, surely this will be the undoing of you. Drink my cup of clean water or my gallon of clean water. Instead, it contains none of the poison that yours does. And I will drink your poisonous water in your place. Because sin in any amount desecrates God’s character, it separates us from him. It causes us to be worthy of judgment. And we stand on the precipice of eternity. Any amount of that poison within us means no access to him. We continue by our very nature, our very presence to drive him away. Jesus, God’s only son, enters the world. He takes the poisonous penalty of our sin. He reaps the consequences of it on our behalf when he dies on the cross. He simultaneously offers us his clean, his pure life that we may again have access, restored relationship, and eternal relationship with God. He says, don’t drink the cup of death, drink the water of life. And the gift comes to us simply by putting our faith in Him for the forgiveness of our sins. He not only cleanses you from the sins in your life, but He purifies you from the sin in your life. The destruction of sin holds no bounds apart from Jesus. But Jesus saves us from the devastating effects of sin, and He restores us to God.
I love the big picture redemptive plan for as hard as it is for us to hear about all this terrible stuff that is a result of Genesis three. And when we really stop to sit back and look at what this means for our lives practically, if you look at your work, as you look at your marriage, as you look at your childbearing, as you look at this ongoing struggle with sin in your life that you’ve had all of your days, these things should keep you up at night. But I love the redemptive plan that is being offered just by glimpse in Genesis three and in full effect as we look forward to God’s plan in scripture. Just consider a couple aspects of it with me.
To the snake, God says, he will bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. Ultimately the head of this serpent, the devil will be destroyed. Hebrews chapter two verse 14 reminds us that Eve’s offspring that would bruise his head was ultimately Jesus himself. It says in Hebrews two, “since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death. That is the devil.” Another part of this redemptive plan is found in the reality that for humankind, when they were created, they gained paradise. A perfect picture in the Garden of Eden, perfect relationship with God. When sin entered the world, paradise was lost and the relationship with God was lost. But we see through Jesus, paradise is coming again.
John chapter 14, verse two, Jesus says, “In my father’s house, there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have not told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself that where I am, you may be also.” And you know the place where I’m going. And the disciples say, well, I don’t know how to get there. And Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” In other words, paradise was gained, paradise was lost, but paradise is coming again. And there’s a way to have that paradise, to have that nearness with God and to even have a proximity to God that results in all this continual blessing to the person and work of Jesus himself. The third part of this redemptive plan that we see is that in the garden, people are cast away from God. They’re banished. But through Christ, people are brought near to God again. Again, John chapter 14, starting at verse 18, Jesus says, “I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you, yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me because I live, you also will live. And in that day, you will know that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you.” So not only have people been banished from the presence of God cast away as a result of the sin of the garden, but in the person of Jesus, not only does God draw them back near to him, but he indwells their very person. He is nearer to them than he’s ever been before. And this is part of his redemptive plan for those who would put their faith in him.
Part four of this redemptive plan is found in the garden we see a pollution with sin, but in Jesus we see a cleansing from it. First John 1:9, a verse that so many of you know well, “If we confess our sins, he’s faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Now I know there are so many of us here today that desire to have that feeling of cleansing. Maybe some of you feel like God is far away because he is far away from you.
Some of us have thought for a long time that as long as the scale is tipped toward my good deeds over my sinful deeds, then I’m gonna be fine in the long run. But that does not deal with the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that we need to be washed, cleaned, purified, cleansed, yes, from our sinful actions, but even more so from our sinful state. Some of us have professed Christ and continue to dabble, to engage, or to minimize the importance and the devastating effects of this sin in our life. And for all of us, the message is clear. Faith in the Son of God, Jesus counteracts the devastating effects of sin and restores us in relationship with him. So as we pray today, I want to encourage you on a couple of lines. Number one, as we talked about last week, again, let the heaviness of this reality sit upon you. Don’t let it escape, because when it escapes, then you begin to trivialize really who God is and where you fit in relation to him. Number two, if you are here today and you’ve never put your faith in Christ, you’ve never been cleansed, you’ve never been on this redemptive plan, you’ve never been brought back near to God again, the way that you do that is through simple faith, that you would confess your sin to God, that you would express a desire to be forgiven by him and that you would trust him to do just that. And then you begin to follow him with your life.
If you wanna do that today, you have an opportunity to do so as we pray together in just a moment. And finally for Christians, take this seriously. Jesus says, those who love me do what I command them to do. That is to say, they don’t dabble in this old nature, they pursue this new nature and be encouraged, be thankful, be rejoicing in this ongoing work of the person of God as he saves us from this ultimate problem. That we would not have chosen for ourselves because we were not in the garden and yet make no mistake about it. We choose it for ourselves almost every day as we continue to sin, don’t we?
So please pray with me as we thank God and ask him for his help. Father, the devastating effects of sin are easy for us to see as we live in a world with multiple wars happening at the same time, as we live in marriages that have strife and struggle, as we have a country now that is again defined by contentious political elections and racial tensions throughout the country. God, the continual devastation of sin is known to us in our own personal lives as we feel the weight of it, as we know it to be true, as we long for something different.
So God, I ask for each one of us today, first for those who have not yet put their faith in Christ, but that desire to, that today would be the day when we confess our sin to you and rely in complete dependence, that we do not wanna drink of this gallon of poison, but that we wanna drink of the cup of life. So Father, we pray that you would forgive our sins, that you would cleanse us from all unrighteousness, that we would grow in trusting you more and more, and that our salvation would be found in you. Amen.
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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.
