What Have You Done? Genesis 3:6-24 (Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost, October 15, 2017)

What Have You Done? Genesis 3:6-24 (Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost, October 15, 2017) 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? 10 And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. 11 He said, Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? 12 The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate. 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? The woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate. 14 The LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. 16 To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. 17 And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. 20 21 The man called his wife s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. And the Lord 22 God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. Then the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach 23 out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever therefore the Lord God 24 sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. PRAY One of my favorite characters in all literature is Atticus Finch, from To Kill a Mockingbird. There s one point in that book where Scout, who is Atticus daughter, visits with their neighbor, Miss Maudie, and the two of them are talking about Boo Radley. Scout asks Miss Maudie if she thinks Boo is crazy. Miss Maudie says, If he s not he should be by now. The things that happen to people we never really know. What happens in houses behind closed doors, what 2017 J.D. Shaw 1

secrets Scout took the comment as a possible criticism of her father, so she says, Atticus don t ever do anything to Jem and me in the house that he don t do in the yard. Gracious child, Miss Maudie said, I wasn t even thinking about your father, but now that I am I ll say this: Atticus Finch is the same in his house as he is on the public streets. No matter where he was, no who he was with, Atticus Finch was the same. Another word to describe this phenomenon is integrity. That word comes from the Latin word integer. Do you remember from junior high math what an integer is? It s a whole number, not a fraction. It s not divided. When you have integrity, then no matter who you are around, no matter the circumstances you re in, you act just the same. You re not divided against yourself. You re not acting this way in front of one group, and that way in front of another. You re not a respecter of persons, wanting this person s approval, ignoring these other people. Integrity means you are the same person all the time. We as human beings are all made in the image of God to have integrity, but we don t. We to some degree are all hypocrites, we all pretend to be people we are not. And our passage for today tells us why. We read here about the fall of man from his state of grace, we read about man s first sin. I want to show us two things from this text: first, the consequences of sin. Second, the solution for sin. First, the consequences of sin. Let s re-read verses 6-9: 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, Where are you? Genesis 3:6-9. Why in the world did Adam and Eve hide? Did they think God couldn t find them? No, the reason the hid was they couldn t help themselves they d broken the relationship with God. He d told them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they agreed, but then they ate of it anyway. In other words, Adam and Eve lacked integrity. They were divided they knew they should have acted one way, but instead they acted another, so they started playing the lamest game of hide-and-go-seek in human history. Parents see this all the time. Say you tell your kids, Do not play ball in the house. But then one day you re in the kitchen, and you hear the familiar sound of kids bouncing a ball in the living room, and then crash. 2017 J.D. Shaw 2

You run in there and what do you find? I ll tell you what you don t see. You don t find all your children lined up, oldest to youngest, confessing how they disobeyed you. Instead, you walk into the living room and no one is there. The children vanish. Why? Because they know they lack integrity, they said they wouldn t do something but they did it anyway. It s almost like they can t help it like Adam and Eve, they ve got to run and hide. This shows us that the first consequence of sin is shame. David Atkinson, in his commentary on Genesis, defines shame like this: that sense of unease with yourself at the heart of your being. Before they ate the fruit, Adam and Eve had been covered by the love and pleasure of God. That s what we were all built for you and I were designed by God to know and love and enjoy him forever. You know what it s like to have someone you really admire admire you? Doesn t that feel good? Someone you think the world of thinking the world of you? That feels so good, doesn t it? Friends, we were designed to feel the pleasure of the most admirable person in the universe God himself. We were made to bask in it like we would the sun or swim in it the way we would the ocean. When they were people of integrity, Adam and Eve weren t worried about being naked. Genesis 2:25: And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. They felt completely secure, comfortable in their own skin. They were whole, they had integrity, and therefore they were holy. But once Adam and Eve disobeyed their physical nakedness became an expression of their spiritual nakedness, their shame, their lack of integrity. Even though nothing changed physically they d always been naked now felt the shame of no integrity. They had unease in the heart of their beings. And they had to cover themselves. With what? Verse 7 tells us: fig leaves. They go from being covered by the love of Almighty God to being covered by fig leaves. It s so pathetic and sad: they sewed together fig leaves to cover themselves because they didn t know what else to do. But fig leaves make a horrible covering! They dry out, wilt, and fall off. They re drafty. A strong breeze blows by, and the leaves go everywhere you re exposed again. And, you know, we are all trying to cover ourselves, too, and our coverings work just about as well as fig leaves. We are desperate to be admired, we want to be praised, we want to be loved, but deep down we all fear we are not good enough to be admired, praised, and loved. We figure if we are known for who we really are, no one will ever really love us. So we cover ourselves. How? Maybe we just work really hard to control what other people think of us. I m only going to let you know what I want you to know about me, I m not going to really let you know me, because I need for you to be impressed by me even if it s not the whole 2017 J.D. Shaw 3

story about me. I d rather be loved for someone I m not than take the risk of being really known, because deep down I m afraid if I do no one will ever know me and love me. Sometimes it means we only associate with the right kind of people, and we never associate with those kind of people over there. Often we think, If I have enough money, or enough nice things, or can afford to go on this trip, I won t feel so pitiful anymore. If I have a relationship with this person of the opposite sex, then I ll feel better. But it doesn t work. The only thing that can keep us from the shame we all carry around is being covered by the love of God. Anything else is just fig leaves. Another consequence of sin can be found in Genesis 3:17-19: And to Adam he said, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, You shall not eat of it, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The earth is broken now because of sin. It doesn t work correctly. We can t get comfortable, we can t relax on earth. It doesn t fit us anymore the way the garden fit Adam and Eve. Why do I get up here and sweat while I preach on Sunday mornings while many of you are freezing in the room? Sin! Natural disasters like all the hurricanes we ve had this fall were not a part of God s original good design. Romans 8:21 says that creation is in bondage to corruption. Work is hard now there are thorns and thistles (literal and metaphorical ones) that make even the best jobs, the jobs we love and wouldn t trade for any other, taxing and difficult. Finally, Genesis 3:16: 16 To the woman he said, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children [now I have it on good authority this is true, so I won t try to prove it to you this morning. My wife assures me childbearing is painful. I ll focus instead on the second part of verse 16]. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. If you know anything at all about the history of the world, then you know that indeed men have ruled over women. Up until the last two hundred years or so, women were basically considered the property of their husbands or their fathers. Women couldn t vote until the twentieth century in the United States. But even though women have the same civil rights as men today, this particular consequence of sin is still very much with us. Gerhard Von Rad, in his commentary on Genesis, writes that the woman has a profound desire for the man in whom she still does not find fulfillment and rest, but rather humiliating domination! Genesis, 93. That burden continues to this day of course. In the summer of 2013, I read an article in The New York Times where the author interviewed sixty female students at the University of Pennsylvania over the course of the previous academic year, and specifically the author wanted to know what these very bright, very talented young women thought about the dating culture at their college. 2017 J.D. Shaw 4

But she found out quickly that you couldn t call what happened at Penn a dating culture, because virtually no relationships or friendships formed between the girls and the boys. The interaction between them was purely physical. It s the hookup culture. The author of the article and the social scientists interviewed tried very hard to paint the hookup culture as a victory for women in our society. These young women are freed from the constraints of our country s puritanical past, they said, they aren t looking for a ring by spring, they aren t going to trade their career for a man or a family. They didn t need relationships with men to justify their existence. But I thought the most telling part of the article was that these young women unanimously said they could not participate in this male/female environment without lots of alcohol; they had to numb themselves because it was too scary and uncomfortable. Yet these young women said the boys at Penn did not seem to mind it at all. I read this article and all I could think about was Genesis 3:16: Your desire will be for the man, and he will rule over you. It s domination. It s fear and loathing and shame; it s the curse of sin writ large on these young women s lives. The consequences of sin are catastrophic and effect each and every one of us. Then the LORD God said to the woman, What is this that you have done? Genesis 3:13. What have we done? And what can we do about it? This question gets to the heart of Christianity, and the uniform answer provided by the Christian tradition has always been that you can t do anything about it. In fact, no religion on the planet has a dimmer view of the ability of human beings to fix or repair their own condition than Christianity. Christians believe in original sin and total depravity. Original sin mean that we inherit our guilt from Adam and Eve the guilt of their sin has been passed on to us through our DNA as it were. Paul is very clear about this in Romans 5. We are guilty before we ever come out of the womb. Total depravity means we are totally unable to save ourselves. It does not mean that we are as bad as we could possibly be, but that every part of humankind s existence is infected by sin. We are totally unable to fix the problems we have. The Bible uses several metaphors to describe what we are in our sins: we are trapped in darkness in our sins, we are blind, we are enslaved, we are confused, we are deaf in our sins. It s really hard to heal yourself when you are blind, deaf, confused, and enslaved in the dark. But there s one more metaphor that really gets it across: And you were dead in the trespasses and Ephesians 2:1. No corpse has ever healed himself. God says to Adam and Eve, What have you done? What have we done? We have sinned and are guilty before God. 2017 J.D. Shaw 5

Second, the solution for sin. I believe there are two gestures toward the solution for sin in Genesis 3. The first is found in Genesis 3:21: And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. God killed an animal a sheep or a calf perhaps to give Adam and Eve clothes to cover their nakedness. John Calvin writes this about that verse: Truly it was a sad and horrid spectacle: that he in whom recently the glory of the Divine image was shining, should lie hidden under fetid skins to cover his own disgrace, and that there should be more comeliness in a dead animal than in a living man! Adam and Eve in their integrity before sin, in their perfect relationship with God before the fall, wore their righteousness like a garment. God smiled on them, they knew it, and the Divine image shown forth from them. But they voluntarily took their righteousness off when they sinned. They were now naked and ashamed! Yet I think also there is more than a hint of grace in verse 21 because through those skins God gave Adam and Eve he points forward to how he will fully and finally cover man s shame. Thousands of years after Adam and Eve, another man, a new Adam, came to earth. He was God in the flesh, fully God and fully man. He was Jesus Christ. And Jesus was a man of integrity. You talk about someone who wasn t a respecter of persons Jesus Christ did not care who you were. He was going to treat you the same way whether you were a Samaritan prostitute drawing water from a well in the noonday eat or King Herod himself. He wasn t worried about what you thought of him. Total and complete integrity. He never covered himself with fig leaves; he never had the need to cover. He only loved and cared for the people around him. He never said a malicious word, he never committed a selfish deed. Even when he was severe with people (and he was, many times), it was because it was exactly what they needed to hear, and not because he was blowing off steam. So when he died on the cross, he was not dying for his sins. He didn t have any. He d never done anything to feel guilty or ashamed about. He had complete integrity. Instead, he was on a rescue mission. He came to give us back the righteousness, the covering, the integrity we lost when our first parents sinned in the garden. It is true that no religion has a more hopeless view of the human condition that Christianity, but likewise no religion has a more radical, more gracious, more perfect and total solution to man s sin than Christianity. You see, the final question we need to answer is not what have we done? but Do you what has God done for you in Jesus? In Jesus Christ, God has atoned for, he has covered over, our sins. Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Romans 4:7-8. When you see that and really believe it, when you believe that Jesus came and died to give you his righteousness, you don t have to try and cover yourselves any more. What are you covering yourself with? Is it your work? Are you thinking, If I can just get this to happen at work then I ll be ok? Or, If I can just get this person to go out with me then I ll be ok? What are you running to to feel better about yourself? Is it money? Is it alcohol? Is it the praise of others? Whatever it is, it won t cover you. I mean it might for a twelve hours or so, 2017 J.D. Shaw 6

but then you feel naked all over again. Only the love of God found in the gospel can do it that s what you were made for. Jesus Christ came on a rescue mission to heal the world from sin. That doesn t just mean he s come to rescue individuals who live in the world but the world itself. Christians are often criticized like this: You Christians are perfectly willing to tell individual people that they are sinners, but you re not willing to critique a society that is broken and unfair to women, to minority ethnic groups, to the poor. I want to be clear about this: Christians of all people should work hard to make the societies we live in as just, as kind, and as compassionate to all people as we possibly can. It s hard to do because we don t all agree on what that will look like let alone how to do it, but all Christians should want this and pray for this and work for this in some way. In Luke 4:18-19 Jesus in his first sermon says, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord s favor. Let s don t spiritualize those verses away the gospel is particularly good news for the poor and the oppressed because as the gospel works its way through any society, it transforms it into a place where all people are free from exploitation and abuse and valued and respected. The other solution for sin we see in Genesis 3 can be found in verses 14-15: The LORD God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. Since the days of the early church verse 15 has been interpreted as the first proclamation of the gospel in the Bible. Jesus Christ is the offspring of the woman, and he is at war with the serpent, with, in other words, Satan. Satan is the one who instigated man s fall. He s the one that led Adam and Eve into sin. And the word Satan literally means accuser. Here s how he works against God s people: he tempts people into sin, showing us how great it will be and how good we ll feel, and then after we sin he accuses us and says, God certainly can t love you, because you have no integrity. You are a sinner, you broke God s law, and God will punish sin. That s all true we do lack integrity, we have broken God s law. However, it doesn t matter how little integrity we have, because we are not counting on our integrity but Jesus! He is our savior! On the cross, Jesus bruised Satan s head. Other translations say he crushed Satan. In other words, he destroyed Satan s ability to accuse us and condemn us for our sins. Colossians 2 says that through his death on the cross Jesus disarmed Satan and all his minions. Therefore, Satan s accusations, no matter how true they may be, can t touch us. God will punish sin, but if we are in Jesus Christ he won t punish us, because Jesus took the punishment for us! 2017 J.D. Shaw 7

And nothing is going to change that! No matter what sins you ve committed in the past, no matter what sins have been done to you, no matter what you might do in the future when the righteousness of Jesus Christ covers you, you cannot lose it. How could you lose something you didn t do anything to secure in the first place? Some of you are terrified other people will find out what a big mess you are and how weak you really feel or what you really think. You know what the gospel says? Who cares? Who cares? Jesus Christ was perfect for you, so you don t have to be. Jesus Christ secures the love of God for you forever who gives a rip what anyone else thinks? Jesus Christ has crushed the head of the accuser. I love the hymn that says, Well may the accuser roar of things that I have done! I know them all and thousands more; Jehovah knoweth none. The question for Christians is not finally what have you done? but do you know what has God in Jesus Christ done for me? Can you say that Jesus died for you? Can you say when all the stresses of life get at you, I am covered by the righteousness of my Lord Jesus Christ? I hope you can. Amen. 2017 J.D. Shaw 8